Quotes from Howard Bloom

individuals will sacrifice themselves for the good of a larger whole. When groups struggle, the ones which boast the most effective organization, strategy, and weapons win. Individuals who contribute to their group's virtuosity will be part of the team which survives.

Both T cells and neural network nodes compete for the right to commandeer the resources of the system in which they abide. And both show a seeming "willingness" to live by the rules which dictate self-denial. This combination of competition and selflessness turns an agglomeration of electronic or biological components into a learning machine with a quandary-solving power vastly beyond that of any individual module it contains.

There are numerous hints that trade, like the spiny lobsters' seasonal parades, may have been stamped by the Baldwin Effect into human DNA. Animal behaviorist Frans de Waal feels that humans offer each other presents (and expect returns) much more often than other primates do. This tendency shows up just a few years after birth, when children are often driven by instinct more powerfully than by what they've learned.

We might suspect that this attempt to balance the books through reciprocity was just the product of civilized parenting … if it weren't for the fact that every society that's been studied, no matter how advanced or primitive, has a principle of give and take.

During the last 3,000 years, long-distance trading cultures have steadily conquered, displaced, absorbed, or erased indigenous clans less enthusiastic about peddling wares across wide stretches of both sea and land.

It is time for evolutionists to open their minds and abandon individual selectionism as a rigid creed which cannot coexist with its supposed opposite, group selection

Roughly 12 billion years ago, a submicroscopic pinpoint of false vacuum arose in the nothingness and expanded at a rate beyond human comprehension, doubling every 10–34 seconds.1 As it whooshed from insignificance to enormity it cooled, allowing quarks, neutrinos, photons, electrons, then the quark triumvirates known as protons and neutrons to precipitate from its energy.

The latest findings suggest that before the new sphere's crust could even stabilize, the powers of chemical attraction yanked together the first detectable life.

The journal Science went so far as to predict that farmers might go from eking out pennies in old-style agriculture to making a handsome profit in the twenty-first century by turning their efforts to "pharming" 40—raising pharmaceutical-producing herds and crops.

crucial turning point. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the human information network finally spanned the planet.

At the same time, Europe's long-dead postal service was resumed. Now Erasmus could become a snail-mail junkie, using a stream of letters24 to unite a community of international eccentrics into a movement which downgraded religion's death ride to heaven and exalted earthly humanity. The moment was appropriate. For the first time since the rise of multicellularity, there was no longer just one global brain but two—one microbial, the other that of man- and womankind.

abstractions may be indispensable. But they don't accurately reflect reality.

The clam had shown up 200 million years before the action really began. Virtually all the phyla that have crawled, walked, flown, or swum during the modern era arose roughly 520 million years ago in a blink of geologic time so brief it's called the "Cambrian explosion.

Modern bacteria still shift from pioneers to colonizers and back to pioneers again, leaving ripples of concentric circles clear as a dartboard's rings.

The early-twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinker Carl Jung, says Kagan, originated the concept of introverted and extroverted personalities. Jung also believed that each had a slightly different brain structure.

Informationally linked microorganisms*29 possessed a skill exceeding the capacities of any supercomputer from Cray Research or Fujitsu. In a crisis, bacteria did not rely on deliverance via a random process like mutation, but instead unleashed their genius as genetic engineers.

a lot of evolution has gone over the dam since 3.5 billion B.C. What, if anything, has happened to the global brain since then? The story is a strange one. Paleontological dogma has it that virtually nothing of significance occurred again until the Cambrian explosion roughly 535 million years ago.

Kagan feels that in his own way, he has proven Jung right. He's found that 10 to 15 percent of infants are born with a tendency to be fearful and withdrawn, while another 10 to 15 percent are born with a flair for dauntless spontaneity

But evidence indicates that intimate forms of organization were undergoing long and ever more intricate tests to see which ones would be among the chosen few to flourish next.

According to biologist Lynn Margulis, it was this collaborative approach which allowed life to survive the first toxic pollutant holocaust—the spread in the atmosphere of a gas lethal to earth's horde of early inhabitants. The killer gas was oxygen. But mitochondria living in the new eukaryotic cells saved the day, gulping oxygen before it could do its harm and turning the murderous vapor into food for their protectress and for the other members of her cellular commune.

This gave the diversity generator the opportunity to upgrade a component critical to the development of global mind, one which had appeared back in Catal Hüyük in more primitive form—the interest group, the subculture, the specialized clique, the gestator of new ways of thinking, new preoccupations, new emotional stances, new techniques, and new beliefs.

Each new conviction flowing from abroad entered the marketplace of ideas, vied for buyers, and if it became a hit, gathered round it a fan club, its own minisociety.

The basic rule of learning machines is one we've already seen: turn on the juice to components which have a grip on the problem at hand and turn off the power to those components which just can't seem to understand. Inner-judges help decide whether the components in which they reside will be enriched or will be denied, then they aid in carrying out the sentence.

When we feel like kicking ourselves around the block or curling up and disappearing, our condemnation comes from inner-judges like guilt and shame. What's a good deal harder to realize is that behind the scenes our inner-judges sicken us and dumb us down quite literally. If they sense we're a drag on the collective intelligence, inner-judges downshift our immune system and neurochemically cloud our ability to perceive.