Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

by Howard Bloom

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SKU 9780471419198

"As someone who has spent forty years in psychology with a long-standing interest in evolution, I'll just assimilate Howard Bloom's accomplishment and my amazement."-David Smillie, Visiting Professor of Zoology, Duke University

In this extraordinary follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom-one of today's preeminent thinkers-offers us a bold rewrite of the evolutionary saga. He shows how plants and animals (including humans) have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. He describes the network of life on Earth as one that is, in fact, a "complex adaptive system," a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious, sometimes unknowing role, and he reveals that the World Wide Web is just the latest step in the development of this brain. These are theories as important as they are radical.

Informed by twenty years of interdisciplinary research, Bloom takes us on a spellbinding journey back to the big bang to let us see how its fires forged primordial sociality. As he brings us back via surprising routes, we see how our earliest bacterial ancestors built multitrillion-member research and development teams a full 3.5 billion years ago. We watch him unravel the previously unrecognized strands of interconnectedness woven by crowds of trilobites, hunting packs of dinosaurs, feathered flying lizards gathered in flocks, troops of baboons making communal decisions, and adventurous tribes of protohumans spreading across continents but still linked by primitive forms of information networking. We soon find ourselves reconsidering our place in the world.

Along the way, Bloom offers us exhilarating insights into the strange tricks of body and mind that have organized a variety of life forms: spiny lobsters, which, during the Paleozoic age, participated in communal marching rituals; and bees, which, during the age of dinosaurs, conducted collective brainwork. This fascinating tour continues on to the sometimes brutal subculture wars that have spurred the growth of human civilization since the Stone Age. Bloom shows us how culture shapes our infant brains, immersing us in a matrix of truth and mass delusion that we think of as reality.

Global Brain is more than just a brilliantly original contribution to the ongoing debate on the inner workings of evolution. It is a "grand vision," says the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, a work that transforms our very view of who we are and why.

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Book details

Author: Howard Bloom
Imprint: Trade Paper Press, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
Published: August 1, 2001
Pages: 384
Formats: Paperback, Hardcover
Subjects: Science › Life Sciences › Evolution
Science › Cognitive Science
Science › History
Topics: collective consciousness · complex adaptive systems · collective intelligence · history of life on Earth · cognitive science · social evolution
ISBN-13: 9780471419198 (Paperback)9781620456064 (Hardcover)

About the author

HOWARD BLOOM is a Visiting Scholar at New York University and former Core Faculty Member at The Graduate Institute whose work spans evolutionary psychology, cosmology, and mass behavior. His recent books include The God Problem, The Genius of the Beast and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.

Bloom is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Society, and the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project. He has lectured at Yale, Stanford, and Columbia University.

When not writing, Bloom has worked as a music publicist, representing artists including Prince and Billy Joel. That immersion in mass culture and human behavior informs his examination of collective mind and social forces throughout his books.

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