• In total there are 4 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 4 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Michael Shermer on Howard Bloom's "Global Brain"

#6: Jan. - Feb. 2003 (Non-Fiction)
User avatar
Chris OConnor

1A - OWNER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 17016
Joined: Sun May 05, 2002 2:43 pm
21
Location: Florida
Has thanked: 3509 times
Been thanked: 1309 times
Gender:
Contact:
United States of America

Michael Shermer on Howard Bloom's "Global Brain"

Unread post

Head Trips By Michael ShermerWashington Post Book World, Sunday , 2000 October 22; Page X13 GLOBAL BRAIN: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the21st CenturyBy Howard BloomWiley. 370 pp. $27.95If fossils are the key to recovering a lost past, then words areliving fossils, revealing both origin and meaning. In modernGreece, 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"). Ametaphor is a figure of speech that transfers or carries meaningfrom one object to another.This linguistic minutia came to mind as I read Howard Bloom'sGlobal Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the21st Century. How can one capture the evolution of everything inthe cosmos, from the start to now, in a single book? One way isthrough metaphor, and Bloom's choice for his carrier is thecomputer--more specifically, the Internet and World Wide Web--which he hopes will transfer the idea of nerve cells communicatingacross a brain to individuals talking across a world.Bloom correctly credits this metaphor to others (global-brainmetaphors have been common since the early 1980s), but he seessomething deeper, in both time and space. "This planetary mind isneither uniquely human," he writes, "nor a product of technology."Indeed, it goes all the way back to the beginning. Al Gore didn'tinvent the Internet, bacteria did. "Three and a half billion yearsago, our earliest cellular ancestors, bacteria, evolved incolonies. Each bacterium couldn't live without the comfort ofrubbing against its neighbors. If it was separated from itscompanions, a healthy bacterium would rapidly divide to create anew society filled with fresh compatriots. Each colony of thesesingle-celled foremothers faced warfare, disaster, the hunt forfood, and windfalls of plenty as a megateam."Bloom's "new scientific theory," as he calls it, explains "theinner workings of something to which conventional evolutionarythinkers have been blind: a planet pulsing with a more-than-massive data-sharing mind." Why haven't these scientists sharedBloom's vision? The tyranny of individual selection has blindedthem to the possibilities of group selection. This is acontentious issue tantamount to, if you will excuse my ownmetaphor-making, the merits of infant baptism as debated byBaptists and Anabaptists, with emotions running as high andfactions fighting as divisively.Individual selectionists, best characterized by their championRichard Dawkins with his selfish-gene model, argue for a gene-centered theory of evolution where the chicken is just the egg'sway of getting its DNA into the next generation. Behavior isselfishly motivated, cooperation is merely the tool of inclusivefitness, apparent altruism is actually "reciprocal altruism" (I'llscratch your back if you'll scratch mine, with the "mine" partreigning supreme). Group selectionists, says Bloom, have theirchampion in none other than Charles Darwin, who argued thatindividuals can better pass on their DNA by being members of agroup, especially (as Bloom cranks up the metaphor machine) agroup with "hyperlinks," "networks," "nodes" that "interlink ourdata" with "new information cabling" whose "wiring upgrade wouldsomeday put us on the road to broadband connectivity." (WouldDarwin 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 complexitytheorists at the Santa Fe Institute--the complex adaptive system(CAS). A CAS is any system that learns, such as an immune systemthat updates its responses to mutating viruses, an economy thatadapts to changes in supply and demand, or an ecosystem thatadapts to decreases in rainfall and increases in temperature. Herewe reach the crux of Bloom's theory about the evolution of themass mind (expressed through a mass metaphor):"Social animals are linked in networks of information exchange.Meanwhile, self-destruct mechanisms turn a creature on and offdepending on his or her ability to get a handle on the tricks andtraps of circumstance. The result is a complex adaptive system--aweb of semi-independent operatives linked to form a learningmachine. . . . Pit one socially networked problem-solving webagainst another--a constant occurrence in nature--and the onewhich most successfully takes advantage of complex adaptivesystems rules, that which is the most powerful cooperativelearning contraption, will almost always win."Bloom's computer metaphor goes into overdrive in his definitivesummary statement: "Our pleasures and our miseries wire us humansas modules, nodes, components, agents, and microprocessors in themost intriguing calculator ever to take shape on this earth. It'sthe form of social computer which gave not only us but all theliving world around us its first birth." How? Another metaphor iscalled for: the neural network--a complex system of neurons thatgrow new connections in response to a changing environment. Thisis also known as learning.So far so good, but there is nothing especially innovative inthese metaphors. What Bloom adds to the formula is his theory thatthese complex adaptive systems "apply an algorithm--a workingrule--best expressed by Jesus of Nazareth: 'To he [sic] who hathit shall be given; from he [sic] who hath not even what he hathshall be taken away.' " This not-so-Christian sentiment can beseen in immune systems, which consist of billions of antibodiesnetworked in such a way that "agents which contribute successfullyto the solution of a problem are snowed with resources andinfluence. But woe be unto those unable to assist the group."What makes the CAS metaphor powerful is that it is fractal (toapply yet another metaphor from chaos theory)--you can scale it upand down, like those computer-generated fractal coastlines thatlook the same at any size. What works for T cells and immunesystems works for bacteria in stromatolite colonies, insects inplagues, geese in gaggles, dolphins in pods, and people in tribesand nations. That first bacterial Internet was founded threebillion years ago when, through wind and currents, bacteria"mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. They swappedsnippets of genetic material like humans trading computerprograms. This system of molecular gossip allowed microorganismsto telegraph an improvement from the seas of today's Australia tothe shallow waters covering the Midwest of today's North America."But the exchanges--er, I mean data swaps--were not equitable. Thebiblical algorithm meant that life wasn't fair to bacteria, and itstill isn't for us. As Bloom demonstrates with eye-blurringdollops of data (including more than any reader would ever want toknow about bacteria), at each fractal level the rich get richerand the poor get poorer. It turns out that it really is who youknow, whether you are a blue-green algae or a blue-eyed babe (ordude); and evidence shows that the best-looking people get moreattention from their teachers and peers, make more money, get moredates, 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 handicappedbecause of "an ancient impulse to distance ourselves from thosewho may be carrying one of the primary killers of pre-modern menand animals--infectious disease."To make matters worse, overwhelming evidence shows that ourpropensity for prejudice is grounded in three billion years of theevolution of another algorithm: Like attracts like. From protonsand protozoa to pandas and people, all prefer to be with their ownkind. Studies show, for example, that whites prefer to be withwhites, blacks with blacks; Protestants choose Protestants forfriends; Catholics choose Catholics. That doesn't sound so baduntil you consider what whites, blacks, Protestants and Catholicsdo to those not in their preferred cohort. "Remember a networkedlearning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections tothose who succeed, weaken them to those who fail." To the winnersgo the spoils, to the losers goes the winner's disdain. This is notree-hugging, fuzzy feel-good theory. "Conformity-enforcing packsof vicious children and adults gradually shape the socialcomplexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnicgroups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion includeridicule, 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 playout our necessary contests civilly, the closer we will come toturning spears to pruning hooks and swords to plowshares--purgingthe global brain at last of blood and butchery." How? "If each ofus contributes one small step to this long march of history, wewill finally achieve what no god but the will within us canbequeath--a peaceful destiny."This is a warm sentiment, but I have two serious reservationsabout Global Brain. First, Bloom has gone metaphor-mad, making mewonder if a correspondence to reality actually exists. Would thetheory stand without the metaphor? As T. Wilson warned in his 1553book on rhetoric: "A metaphor is an alteration of a woorde fromthe proper and naturall meanynge, to that whiche is not proper,and yet agreeth therunto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be init." I wonder if this is all nothing more than a likeness. Second,a theory that explains everything explains nothing. This grandtheory is only part of Bloom's own self-created scientificdiscipline--"paleopsychology"--which, he says, will "map out theevolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation fromthe first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present." Althoughscience traffics in generalizing from particulars, is it reallypossible that life, the cosmos and everything can be explained bya single, overarching idea? I'm skeptical.Such mass, metaphor-making, interdisciplinary thinking is at theheart of Bloom's weakness as a thinker; it is also, andundeniably, his greatest strength. I am intrigued by the uniqueintellectual style of Bloom, a one-time music magazine publisherand rock promoter who has coupled his interest in social relationswith his background in science to generate a number of interestingobservations and deductions in Global Brain. Despite myreservations, this is a clever book, meticulously researched,beautifully written, and well worth reading, even if you don't buyits thesis. Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and theauthor 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
Jeremy1952
Kindle Fanatic
Posts: 545
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2002 2:19 pm
21
Location: Saint Louis

Re: Michael Shermer on Howard Bloom's "Global Brain&quo

Unread post

Quote: 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,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.Quote: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). 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 GroupsThanks 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
xilog

Re: Michael Shermer on Howard Bloom's "Global Brain&

Unread post

Quote:this is the worst kind of straw-man argument, and it is exactly the source of my distaste for Bloom.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.Quote:and as I have posted elsewhere, the leader of the Santa Fe institute, Stuart Kauffman, is very clear that group selection is a fallacyWhich doesn't in fact establish that Bloom is wrong in thinking complexity theory a bridge, it at best establishes that Kauffmann disagrees with him.Quote:and that real biology has to be explained, ultimately, in terms of individuals.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.
Jeremy1952
Kindle Fanatic
Posts: 545
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2002 2:19 pm
21
Location: Saint Louis

Re: Michael Shermer on Howard Bloom's "Global Brain&

Unread post

Quote: 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. 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.
xilog

Re: Michael Shermer on Howard Bloom's "Global Brain&

Unread post

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?
Jeremy1952
Kindle Fanatic
Posts: 545
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2002 2:19 pm
21
Location: Saint Louis

Group Selection?

Unread post

Quote: Surely you don't imagine that the group selection debate has arisen because some people don't know that individuals live or die?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.
User avatar
ZachSylvanus
Agrees that Reading is Fundamental
Posts: 286
Joined: Sat Aug 10, 2002 4:54 pm
21
Location: Fort Collins, CO
Been thanked: 3 times
Contact:

Re: Group Selection?

Unread post

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.
xilog

Re: Group Selection?

Unread post

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.
Jeremy1952
Kindle Fanatic
Posts: 545
Joined: Sun Oct 27, 2002 2:19 pm
21
Location: Saint Louis

Re: Group Selection?

Unread post

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

Re: Group Selection?

Unread post

Quote:If the group does better, the individuals in the group do better. Not necessarily. Do you really need me to cite countexamples to this thesis?Quote:Instead of considering what you think (incorrectly) that Dawkins might have said, read the book.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?Quote: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.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.Quote:"Genuinely altruistic" is meaningless.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).Quote:"good" is an ethical judgment, outside the scope of scientific inquiry."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.
Post Reply

Return to “Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century - by Howard Bloom”