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

Description

Howard Bloom is the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, and a board member of the Epic of Evolution Society. He’s also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the European Sociobiological Society, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who's Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception. He is a visiting scholar at New York University. In 1995 Bloom founded an informal academic circle called “The Group Selection Squad,” whose efforts precipitated radical reevaluations of ncoDarwinist dogma within the scientific community. In 1997, he founded a new discipline, paleopsychology, whose participants have included physicists, psychologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, entomologists, neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, invertebrate zoologists, and systems theorists. The introduction to Bloom’s theories, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), has undergone eleven printings and been the focus of considerable attention in the scientific community. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (coauthor of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior) said Bloom “raced ahead of the timid scientific herd” with a “grand vision” that “we do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.” Added Elizabeth F. Loftus, past president of the American Psychological Society: Bloom has achieved “a revolutionary vision of the relationship between psychology and history. The Lucifer Principle will have a profound impact on our concepts of human nature. It is astonishing that a book of this importance could be such a pleasure to read.” Howard Bloom lives and works in New York City. Global Brain Contents Prologue: Biology, Evolution, and the Global Brain 1. Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era 2. Networking in Paleontology's “Dark Ages” 3. The Embryonic Meme 4. From Social Synapses to Social Ganglions: Complex Adaptive Systems in Jurassic Days 5. Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind 6. Threading a New Tapestry 7. A Trip through the Perception Factory 8. Reality Is a Shared Hallucination 9. The Conformity Police 10. Diversity Generators: The Huddle and the Squabble — Group Fission 11. The End of the Ice Age and the Rise of Urban Fire 12. The Weave of Conquest and the Genes of Trade 13. Greece, Miletus, and Thales: The Birth of the Boundary Breakers 14. Sparta and Baboonery: The Guesswork of Collective Mind 15. The Pluralism Hypothesis: Athens’ Underside 16. Pythagoras, Subcultures, and Psycho-Bio- Circuitry 17. Swiveling Eyes and Pivoting Minds: The Pull of Influence Attractors 18. Outstretch, Upgrade, and Irrationality: Science and the Warps of Mass Psychology 19. The Kidnap of Mass Mind: Fundamentalism, Spartanism, and the Games Subcultures Play 20. Interspecies Global Mind 21. Conclusion: The Reality of the Mass Mind’s Dreams: Terraforming the Cosmos NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX