Quotes from Howard Bloom

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

How does the cosmos create? That's not just any question, it's 'the' question. It's the God Problem.

Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron which this universe had never known. ... Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood.

My job, one of them, in science, was to find the gods inside of us.

New questions can produce new scientific leaps. They can tiddlywink new flips of insight and understanding. Big ones. Paradigm shifts.

How does a cosmos without a bearded, bathrobed God in the sky pull off all the things that a bearded, bathrobed guy in the sky was supposed to have pulled off? If there was no God who said 'Let there be light,' where did we get all that light?

Is what makes you solid a part of you? If the answer is yes, then you are a child of the big bang and a descendant of explosions, collisions, catastrophes, stars, and galaxies. The protons in your hand have been through every slam, every bash, every disaster, and every creative crash this cosmos has ever managed to throw their way. [...] The story of those cosmic calamities and material miracles is your biography. The story of the universe - from protons and suns to curiosity - is your history.

Eukaryotes topped that trick with yet another innovation—an elaborately orchestrated breakthrough in cell-division called meiosis.

One may code for wrinkles, while the other holds the blueprint for smooth. As long as they stay together, only the stronger of each pair rules. Eukaryotes took advantage of this disagreement between twins. Prokaryotes had xeroxed chromosomes in their entirety. But eukaryotes unzipped their chromosomal ribbons lengthwise, ever-so gently separating each genetic pair. This yielded two skinny juliennes,‡ each with slightly different properties.

Eukaryotes thus launched a great leap forward in data mix-and-matching, one which roils and churns within us to this day. We latter-age eukaryotes call the resulting DNA cut-and-shuffle sexuality.

The dividing eukaryote could not aggressively seek food. Nor could it avoid predatory one-celled creatures whipping through the water in search of someone to eat. The solution: to concentrate spirochetic propellers on the outside of one cell, then to generate an attached cell whose spirochetes could stay inside directing the dance of twining and dividing chromosomes. This, according to Margulis, would start the run-up to another massive leap in the evolution of networks: multicellularity.

These evolutionary achievements were incremental steps toward multicellularity. Colonies of single-celled organisms could be sieved apart, then, if given freedom, were (and still are) able to reconstruct their shattered community.

True to Dr. Sauer's words, 1.4 billion years33 after the new eukaryotic refinements had begun, the first really exotic multicellular beings made their debut beneath the sun.34 One recently discovered fossil clam dates to over 720 million B.C.

We mammals are uncannily good at gravitating toward those who share our hidden joys and woes. This talent for emotional homing crops up among beavers, wolves, and even deer.

Humans are much the same.20 Children whose gifts or disabilities make them seem bizarre, for example, manage to find each other and to congregate.21 Among our kind it's called validation. Without others on our wavelength the strangeness of our emotions can make us feel we're losing our minds.

Networks stretch and alter to achieve new capabilities. Then they mesh as modules in yet grander webs of being. Creatures of a trillion cells achieved new peaks of networking. Yet they wove still higher ties—the ties of sociality.

the scientific view that all behavior is ultimately based on self-interest isn't new at all—it began its climb early in the twentieth century.

As time went on, the meaning of "tribe" was no longer clamped entirely to birth. Newcomers to a Greek city were often assigned a tribe at random—no matter who their forefathers might have been. But once you had your tribal label, it was unchangeable. Despite vocational liberties, preordained identities still stuck to you like glue.

The catalysts for transformation would be three: freedom to escape group boundaries; ideas; and the games subcultures were about to learn to play. We'll see in coming chapters how this triad altered utterly the workings of mass mind.

As we've already seen, individual selectionists insist that a creature—be he man or woman or beast—will only sacrifice his comfort if the payback to his genes is greater than what he gives.

Conquest is the needle which stitched together virtually all of the "great nations" which we know today—allowing such multitribal hodgepodges as Germans, Russians, Arabs, Japanese, English, and French to convince themselves that they have always been ein Volk—one folk with a unique bloodline and history.

From the beginning, we've been yanked together by the tug of sociality. 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.

To manufacture unity, the imperialists of history followed another animal pattern, that of the dominance hierarchy—the strangely unjust principle which sometimes uses brutality to bring individuals or collections of groups together in a stable and ultimately peaceful form. It's ironic that one of our strongest forces of cohesion should be something so unpleasant as our will to lord it over others and that this ace-attractor should be egged on by repulsers—

When you snatch chimps, dogs, laboratory mice, and a wide variety of other animals away from the group they know and love,* exhaustion overwhelms them, their immune system downshifts, and they begin to waste away.