Head Trips
By Michael Shermer

Washington Post Book World, Sunday , 2000 October 22; Page X13

GLOBAL BRAIN: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the
21st CenturyBy Howard BloomWiley. 370 pp. $27.95

If fossils are the key to recovering a lost past, then words are
living fossils, revealing both origin and meaning. In modern
Greece, for example, moving vans and luggage carts proclaim
"metaphora" on their sides, from the ancient Greek word meaning
"transfer" (based in the root phor, meaning "to bear, carry"). A
metaphor is a figure of speech that transfers or carries meaning
from one object to another.

This linguistic minutia came to mind as I read Howard Bloom's
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the
21st Century. How can one capture the evolution of everything in
the cosmos, from the start to now, in a single book? One way is
through metaphor, and Bloom's choice for his carrier is the
computer--more specifically, the Internet and World Wide Web--
which he hopes will transfer the idea of nerve cells communicating
across a brain to individuals talking across a world.

Bloom correctly credits this metaphor to others (global-brain
metaphors have been common since the early 1980s), but he sees
something deeper, in both time and space. "This planetary mind is
neither uniquely human," he writes, "nor a product of technology."
Indeed, it goes all the way back to the beginning. Al Gore didn't
invent the Internet, bacteria did. "Three and a half billion years
ago, our earliest cellular ancestors, bacteria, evolved in
colonies. Each bacterium couldn't live without the comfort of
rubbing against its neighbors. If it was separated from its
companions, a healthy bacterium would rapidly divide to create a
new society filled with fresh compatriots. Each colony of these
single-celled foremothers faced warfare, disaster, the hunt for
food, and windfalls of plenty as a megateam."

Bloom's "new scientific theory," as he calls it, explains "the
inner workings of something to which conventional evolutionary
thinkers have been blind: a planet pulsing with a more-than-
massive data-sharing mind." Why haven't these scientists shared
Bloom's vision? The tyranny of individual selection has blinded
them to the possibilities of group selection. This is a
contentious issue tantamount to, if you will excuse my own
metaphor-making, the merits of infant baptism as debated by
Baptists and Anabaptists, with emotions running as high and
factions fighting as divisively.

Individual selectionists, best characterized by their champion
Richard Dawkins with his selfish-gene model, argue for a gene-
centered theory of evolution where the chicken is just the egg's
way of getting its DNA into the next generation. Behavior is
selfishly motivated, cooperation is merely the tool of inclusive
fitness, apparent altruism is actually "reciprocal altruism" (I'll
scratch your back if you'll scratch mine, with the "mine" part
reigning supreme). Group selectionists, says Bloom, have their
champion in none other than Charles Darwin, who argued that
individuals can better pass on their DNA by being members of a
group, especially (as Bloom cranks up the metaphor machine) a
group with "hyperlinks," "networks," "nodes" that "interlink our
data" with "new information cabling" whose "wiring upgrade would
someday put us on the road to broadband connectivity." (Would
Darwin have any idea what Bloom is talking about?)

The bridge between individual and group selectionists, says Bloom,
is to be found in a metaphor created by the chaos and complexity
theorists at the Santa Fe Institute--the complex adaptive system
(CAS). A CAS is any system that learns, such as an immune system
that updates its responses to mutating viruses, an economy that
adapts to changes in supply and demand, or an ecosystem that
adapts to decreases in rainfall and increases in temperature. Here
we reach the crux of Bloom's theory about the evolution of the
mass mind (expressed through a mass metaphor):

"Social animals are linked in networks of information exchange.
Meanwhile, self-destruct mechanisms turn a creature on and off
depending on his or her ability to get a handle on the tricks and
traps of circumstance. The result is a complex adaptive system--a
web of semi-independent operatives linked to form a learning
machine. . . . Pit one socially networked problem-solving web
against another--a constant occurrence in nature--and the one
which most successfully takes advantage of complex adaptive
systems rules, that which is the most powerful cooperative
learning contraption, will almost always win."

Bloom's computer metaphor goes into overdrive in his definitive
summary statement: "Our pleasures and our miseries wire us humans
as modules, nodes, components, agents, and microprocessors in the
most intriguing calculator ever to take shape on this earth. It's
the form of social computer which gave not only us but all the
living world around us its first birth." How? Another metaphor is
called for: the neural network--a complex system of neurons that
grow new connections in response to a changing environment. This
is also known as learning.

So far so good, but there is nothing especially innovative in
these metaphors. What Bloom adds to the formula is his theory that
these complex adaptive systems "apply an algorithm--a working
rule--best expressed by Jesus of Nazareth: 'To he [sic] who hath
it shall be given; from he [sic] who hath not even what he hath
shall be taken away.' " This not-so-Christian sentiment can be
seen in immune systems, which consist of billions of antibodies
networked in such a way that "agents which contribute successfully
to the solution of a problem are snowed with resources and
influence. But woe be unto those unable to assist the group."

What makes the CAS metaphor powerful is that it is fractal (to
apply yet another metaphor from chaos theory)--you can scale it up
and down, like those computer-generated fractal coastlines that
look the same at any size. What works for T cells and immune
systems works for bacteria in stromatolite colonies, insects in
plagues, geese in gaggles, dolphins in pods, and people in tribes
and nations. That first bacterial Internet was founded three
billion years ago when, through wind and currents, bacteria
"mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. They swapped
snippets of genetic material like humans trading computer
programs. This system of molecular gossip allowed microorganisms
to telegraph an improvement from the seas of today's Australia to
the shallow waters covering the Midwest of today's North America."

But the exchanges--er, I mean data swaps--were not equitable. The
biblical algorithm meant that life wasn't fair to bacteria, and it
still isn't for us. As Bloom demonstrates with eye-blurring
dollops of data (including more than any reader would ever want to
know about bacteria), at each fractal level the rich get richer
and the poor get poorer. It turns out that it really is who you
know, whether you are a blue-green algae or a blue-eyed babe (or
dude); and evidence shows that the best-looking people get more
attention from their teachers and peers, make more money, get more
dates, and generally cash in on the biblical precept. And,
unfortunately, it works in the other direction in all its cruelty.
Children pick on, and adults are intolerant of, the handicapped
because of "an ancient impulse to distance ourselves from those
who may be carrying one of the primary killers of pre-modern men
and animals--infectious disease."

To make matters worse, overwhelming evidence shows that our
propensity for prejudice is grounded in three billion years of the
evolution of another algorithm: Like attracts like. From protons
and protozoa to pandas and people, all prefer to be with their own
kind. Studies show, for example, that whites prefer to be with
whites, blacks with blacks; Protestants choose Protestants for
friends; Catholics choose Catholics. That doesn't sound so bad
until you consider what whites, blacks, Protestants and Catholics
do to those not in their preferred cohort. "Remember a networked
learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to
those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail." To the winners
go the spoils, to the losers goes the winner's disdain. This is no
tree-hugging, fuzzy feel-good theory. "Conformity-enforcing packs
of vicious children and adults gradually shape the social
complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic
groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include
ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault,
torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose."

It sounds grim, but Bloom is optimistic that "the more we can play
out our necessary contests civilly, the closer we will come to
turning spears to pruning hooks and swords to plowshares--purging
the global brain at last of blood and butchery." How? "If each of
us contributes one small step to this long march of history, we
will finally achieve what no god but the will within us can
bequeath--a peaceful destiny."

This is a warm sentiment, but I have two serious reservations
about Global Brain. First, Bloom has gone metaphor-mad, making me
wonder if a correspondence to reality actually exists. Would the
theory stand without the metaphor? As T. Wilson warned in his 1553
book on rhetoric: "A metaphor is an alteration of a woorde from
the proper and naturall meanynge, to that whiche is not proper,
and yet agreeth therunto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be in
it." I wonder if this is all nothing more than a likeness. Second,
a theory that explains everything explains nothing. This grand
theory is only part of Bloom's own self-created scientific
discipline--"paleopsychology"--which, he says, will "map out the
evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from
the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present." Although
science traffics in generalizing from particulars, is it really
possible that life, the cosmos and everything can be explained by
a single, overarching idea? I'm skeptical.

Such mass, metaphor-making, interdisciplinary thinking is at the
heart of Bloom's weakness as a thinker; it is also, and
undeniably, his greatest strength. I am intrigued by the unique
intellectual style of Bloom, a one-time music magazine publisher
and rock promoter who has coupled his interest in social relations
with his background in science to generate a number of interesting
observations and deductions in Global Brain. Despite my
reservations, this is a clever book, meticulously researched,
beautifully written, and well worth reading, even if you don't buy
its thesis.

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the
author of "Why People Believe Weird Things" and "How We Believe."
His latest book is "Denying History."

Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 10/30/05 4:25 pm

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Group selectionists, says Bloom, have their champion in none other than Charles Darwin, who argued that individuals can better pass on their DNA by being members of a group,

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this is the worst kind of straw-man argument, and it is exactly the source of my distaste for Bloom. OF COURSE individuals can pass their DNA on better by being members of a group; otherwise there would not be metazoans. Individuals are served by being members of groups... no group selection required. And by the way, neither DNA nor its function had been discovered at the time of Darwin's death.

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The bridge between individual and group selectionists, says Bloom, is to be found in a metaphor created by the chaos and complexity theorists at the Santa Fe Institute--the complex adaptive system (CAS).

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and as I have posted elsewhere, the leader of the Santa Fe institute, Stuart Kauffman, is very clear that group selection is a fallacy, and that real biology has to be explained, ultimately, in terms of individuals. Memes and Groups

Thanks for sharing Shermer's comments. I don't always agree with him but always find him worth reading.

Edited by: Jeremy1952 at: 1/1/03 11:57:02 am

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this is the worst kind of straw-man argument, and it is exactly the source of my distaste for Bloom.

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Then your distaste is ill-founded, Bloom should be condemned if at all by his own words not by Shermer's.

I don't know which bit of Bloom Shermer is basing his observations on, but Bloom does claim the support of Darwin on page 8/9 of Global Brain.
He does so by quoting Darwin, and it certainly sounds from the quote like Darwing is supporting group selection.
There is in this passage no mention either by Darwin (naturally) or by Bloom of DNA.

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and as I have posted elsewhere, the leader of the Santa Fe institute, Stuart Kauffman, is very clear that group selection is a fallacy

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Which doesn't in fact establish that Bloom is wrong in thinking complexity theory a bridge, it at best establishes that Kauffmann disagrees with him.

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and that real biology has to be explained, ultimately, in terms of individuals.

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Surely anything beginning "real biology has to be explained" cannot be a scientific theory (let alone a fact).
It can only be a methodological dogma.

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Surely anything beginning "real biology has to be explained" cannot be a scientific theory (let alone a fact). It can only be a methodological dogma.

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None of the above. Some things are so basic that they are apparent and necessary. It doesn't take an experiment, hypothesis, or theory to demonstrate that it is individuals that live and die.

Individuals live or die, sure enough.
(Well actually, they all die, there's not much to chose between them on that count.)

But tribes, nations, species, and many other groups also prosper or perish.

Surely you don't imagine that the group selection debate has arisen because some people don't know that individuals live or die?

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Surely you don't imagine that the group selection debate has arisen because some people don't know that individuals live or die?

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Perhaps I misunderstand what is meant by "group selection", but as I have seen it explained by opponents and proponents (including Dr. Bloom), it always comes down to either some unexplainable, mystical force or the issue is ignored completely. Bloom posits some un-named "creative force" driving the universe toward life and more life; despite his avowed atheism, the word for this in English is "god".

Once groups are formed, it is not at issue that they can be selected. The fallacy in group selection is the assertion that this is in some way molding organisms in an alternative to real natural selection. Before a group can be biologically different, the individuals within that group have to be different. It does not, can not, exist independently of its members.

A group of human beings (or other communicating animals) can change culturally, such that the result is a group with different cultural attitudes and methods than another group. And because of the nature of learning, these cultural differences are Lamarckian and can spread through an adult population. But still, before you can select for the meme "Allah is great", you have to have individuals infected with that meme.

It's interesting to note that the evolution of metazoans was responsible for the evolution of death. Multicellular organisms, with specialization in their "jobs", die. Single celled organisms replicate and divide before this, and so they avoid dying.

Individuals power evolution, there's no doubt about that. But after a number of centuries living in groups, you've effectively evolved to be a group organism. Without the group, you're not going to succeed and effectively pass your genetic material on. I don't see why group evolution can't help explain the overall methods of species evolution, so long as it's not taken to an extreme.

Very little in science is an either/or situation, in terms of processes.

You havn't really said much there against group selection that I greatly disagree with, so I think we have failed so far to locate the nature of the dispute.

I think its about how we explain the appearance of some (hereditary) characteristic.
I think genetic reductionists like Dawkins think that the explanation has to be an explanation of how possession of that characteristic improves the reproductive success of the individual who possesses it.

I am a "group selectionist" because I believe that often the best explanation may be that the characteristic is good for some group of which the individual is a member.

I don't myself deny that in some sense these things are probably reducible to the effects of the gene on the reproducive success of individuals, but like other kinds of "reduction in principle" (like the reducibility of the performance of my digestive system to string theory) it is in general totally unrealistic to expect an intelligible explanation in these terms.
One reason for this is that reproductive success is socially determined and the workings of society are very complex.
This is why the theory of complex adaptive systems has some relevence to the group selection issue.

Now, as to why this is important, you have only to look at "The Selfish Gene" which is (inter alia) an attack on the possibility of genuinely altruistic behaviour in the face of much plain evidence for it.
The general tenor here is that unless some putative altruistic behaviour can be explained in terms of how it enables the genes which produce it to proliferate in the gene pool then it can't be possible.

What Howard's book does is to marshall evidence that genetically we are highly predisposed to culturally determined behaviour and that attempts to provide genetic accounts of why people do what they do are ill-conceived.
Failure of an attempt to explain something at an individual selection level is just that, a failure to comprehend an extremely complex system, it can never serve to disprove the possibility of a particular behaviour, and should not be used to justify the re-labelling of good behaviour as self-serving.

xilog:

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I think genetic reductionists like Dawkins think that the explanation has to be an explanation of how possession of that characteristic improves the reproductive success of the individual who possesses it. I am a "group selectionist" because I believe that often the best explanation may be that the characteristic is good for some group of which the individual is a member.

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If the group does better, the individuals in the group do better. Dawkins explains at some length the mechanism by which this happens. Instead of considering what you think (incorrectly) that Dawkins might have said, read the book.

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I don't myself deny that in some sense these things are probably reducible to the effects of the gene on the reproducive success of individuals, but like other kinds of "reduction in principle" (like the reducibility of the performance of my digestive system to string theory) it is in general totally unrealistic to expect an intelligible explanation in these terms.

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On the other hand, if you posit a hypothesis concerning the workings of your digestive system that violates the laws of physics, it doesn't take much insight to know that it is wrong. Digestive systems follow the laws of survival, and the laws of ontogeny, and the laws of chemistry, and the laws of physics, all the way down.

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"The Selfish Gene" which is (inter alia) an attack on the possibility of genuinely altruistic behaviour

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"Genuinely altruistic" is meaningless. "Altruistic" has a specific, technical meaning in the literature of biology, and behaviour which meets those criteria is "altruistic", no adjective required. And Selfish Gene/Extended Phenotype are not attacks on anything, they are explanations of the very things we are talking about

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If the group does better, the individuals in the group do better.

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Not necessarily. Do you really need me to cite countexamples to this thesis?

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Instead of considering what you think (incorrectly) that Dawkins might have said, read the book.

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I have read the book.
Its not clear to me in what way you think I have mis-represented Dawkins, could you spell that out for me?

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On the other hand, if you posit a hypothesis concerning the workings of your digestive system that violates the laws of physics, it doesn't take much insight to know that it is wrong. Digestive systems follow the laws of survival, and the laws of ontogeny, and the laws of chemistry, and the laws of physics, all the way down.

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But the issue is not about whether the behaviour of my digestive system is determined by string theory.
It is about whether string theory can be used to make useful predictions about the behaviour of my digestive system, or can figure helpfully in an explanation of that behaviour.
When last I read about it, string theory was so complex and obscure that we were still thought to be decades away from the moment when theorists would come up with any testable consequences of string theory.

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"Genuinely altruistic" is meaningless.

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No it isn't.
It's perfectly good and intelligible English, and some such locution is pretty essential in discussing "The Selfish Gene", not least because Dawkins himself thinks that the distinction between "true altruism" and "apparent altruism" is important (his words not mine).

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"good" is an ethical judgment, outside the scope of scientific inquiry.

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"altruistic" would have done in the context, even in the special scientific usage you have mentioned.
However, my objection to Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" is both that his conclusions are scientifically unsound and that the work is morally objectionable.
I don't confine myself to objective scientific remarks.

Xilog

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Its not clear to me in what way you think I have mis-represented Dawkins, could you spell that out for me?

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Dawkins says, (paraphrasing), "Genes are bits of chemicals, that can do nothing but reproduce as fast and as far as possible", and you say, "Dawkins is wrong, humans are not selfish".

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However, my objection to Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" is both that his conclusions are scientifically unsound and that the work is morally objectionable.

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I guess that's as good a place as any to end the discussion... I find your position reprehensible, and taken further, this will likely deteriorate into a mudfest.

Timothy Schoonover

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Ok, that helps Jeremy thanks. Do you think you, or anyone really, could put this in some sort of a thesis statement? I tried and just don't have the background in this to do it justice. Again, I would really appreciate this.

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Not me. . . I don't think it HAS one; in fact, it is quite utter nonsense; it is a bandwagon that people ignorant of biology jump on. "Group Selection" is to biology as "New Age" is to religion.

For the record, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Biology group selection is:

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A mechanism originally proposed to account for the evolution of
altruism in social groups of animals. It was suggested by the British
ethologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards (1906-97) in 1962, and arose from his
observations that individual animals often expose themselves to danger
(for instance by warning of predators) or forego reproduction (as with
worker bees in a colony) for the greater good of the group as a whole.
Hence, groups containing altruistic individuals would have some
selective advantage over groups lacking such members. This conflicts
with Darwinian orthodoxy, which views natural selection as operating
strictly on individuals. Group selection has now been supplanted by the
theory of kin selection as an explanation of apparently altruistic acts.

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However, for the purposes of a discussion of "Global Brain" I don't think we should take it that group selection has been supplanted by kin selection.
If anything, in Bloom the movement is in the opposite direction.

I recommend also to you the following interesting and brief survey of the history of the group selection debate:

The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of Group Selectionism

Edited by: xilog at: 1/14/03 1:59:16 pm

Thank you xilog. That is exactly what I was looking for.

Edited by: Timothy Schoonover at: 1/15/03 6:31:03 pm

"Groups do not have the range of heritable variation that would allow any significant contribution to evolution."

You keep saying that differences between human groups are trivial, but I think that is speculative as is my own opinion that there may be genetically significant differences we cannot perceive. Giraffes are still evolving, but no one can predict in what fashion because we cannot perceive the minute differences that are being selected.

The background for what I'm saying comes from Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors - A Search for Who We Are by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. They note that humans are very adept at noticing minute differences between individuals, associating with those who are alike, and separating from those that are different. Human evolution would have proceeded most rapidly when groups evolve in isolation, concentrating adaptive improvements in that environment over time, and then on rare occasion spreading these genes by mating outside of the group.

That's why I think it's quite possible the gene pool is affected when one group slaughters another. But of course, we'll never know.