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"Howard Bloom may just be the new Stephen Hawking, only he's not interested in science alone; he's interested in the soul." Aaron Hicklin--Gear

"A soaring song of songs about the amorous origins of the world, and its almost medieval urge to copulate." Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large,

"I have met God, and he lives in Brooklyn. ...Howard Bloom is next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Buckminster Fuller...he is going to change the way we see ourselves and everything around us." Richard Metzger, creative director, The Disinformation Company, host of Channel4 TV Britain's Disinfo Nation

"For those who worry that our ingenuity has upset nature's equilibrium, Bloom has a message that is both reassuring and sobering. 'We are nature incarnate,' he writes. 'We are tools of her probings and if, indeed, we suffer and we fail, from our lessons she will learn which way in the future not to turn.'"  

 

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click on photo for a grand tour of the cosmos

Howard Bloom's first book, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces of History, was a shock to those who believe that the greed of genes turns us into selfish loners. But Bloom's second volume, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, will come as an even bigger surprise. Says Elizabeth Loftus, past president of the American Psychological Society: "Howard Bloom's Global Brain is filled with scientific firsts. It is the first book to make a strong, solidly backed, and theoretically original case that we do not live the lonely lives of selfish beings driven by selfish genes, but are parts of a larger whole. It is the first to propose that sociality was implicit in the start of the universe--the Big Bang. Global Brain is the first book to present strong evidence that evolutionary, biological, perceptual, and emotional mechanisms have made us parts of a social learning machine--a mass mind which includes all species of life, not just humankind. It is the first to take this idea out of the realm of mysticism and into the sphere of hard-nosed, data-derived reality. And it is one of the few books which carry off such grand visions with energy, excitement, and keen insight."

Global Brain says that a world-wide web has been with us since the first moments of life, and that global connectivity isn't a product of our technology, it's built into our biology. It's in our cells, our bodies, and our brains.

"A modern-day prophet, Bloom compels us to admit that evolution is a team sport. This is a picture of the universe in which human emotions find their basis in the survival of matter, and the atoms themselves are held together with love. I am awestruck." Douglas Rushkoff-author of Media Virus, Coercion, and Ecstasy Club

Global Brain tells scientific tales so vivid and so little-known they scintillate. The book zooms in on the birth of the first communal intelligence in colonies of cyanobacteria 3.5 billion years ago. A single bacterial society in those days of a spanking-new earth held trillions of members, all hyperlinked by a chemical communication code...and all working together to literally reengineer their genes. Each colony upped the level of microbial ingenuity by broadcasting data-laden macromolecules over the span of continents and seas. Using this global information-web, bacteria pioneered the first planet-straddling research and development system eons before the emergence of brains.

This may sound like far-fetched fantasy, but it's not. Says National Medal of Science-winning biologist Lynn Margulis, Global Brain is "a stunning commitment to scientific evidence." The Washington Post's Michael Shermer adds that, Global Brain is "meticulously researched, and beautifully written." And Amazon.com science editor Rob Lightner says that, "Author Howard Bloom, believed by many to be R. Buckminster Fuller's intellectual heir, takes the reader on a dizzying tour of the universe, from its original subatomic particle network to the unimaginable data-processing power of intergalactic communication...The reader is swept up in Bloom's vision of the power of mass minds and, before long, can't help seeing the similarities between ecosystems, street gangs, and the Internet. [Global Brain is] as exciting as the best science fiction and as convincing as the best research paper."

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Here's how Publisher's Weekly sums Global Brain up: "Blooms debut. The Lucifer Principle sought the biological basis for human evil. Now Bloom is after even bigger game. While cyber-thinkers claim the Internet is bringing us toward some sort of worldwide mind, Bloom believes we've had one all along. Drawing on information theory, debates within evolutionary' biology, and research psychology (among other disciplines), Bloom understands the development of life on Earth as a series of achievements in collective information processing. He stands up for 'group selection' (a minority view among evolutionists) and traces cooperation among organisms-and competition between groups-throughout the history of evolution. 'Creative webs' of early microorganisms teamed up to go after food sources: modern colonies of E. coli bacteria seem to program themselves for useful, nonrandom mutations. Octopi 'teach' one another to avoid aversive stimuli. Ancient Sparta killed its weakest infants; Athens educated them. Each of these is a social learning system. And each such system relies on several functions. 'Conformity enforcers' keep most group members doing the same things; 'diversity generators' seek out new things; 'resource shifters' help the system alter itself to favor new things that work. In Bloom's model, bowling leagues, bacteria, bees, Belgium and brains all behave in similar ways. ...fascinating, ...ambitious, [and] amply footnoted…Bloom's concept of collective information processing may startle skeptical readers with its explanatory' power."
continued on next page...along with Stone Age beauties and one of the strangest Cambrian beasts you've ever seen...

click photo below to dive into the microworld

They live in megalopolises, carve out empires, and are the world's swiftest innovators.
They're not the Chinese, the Japanese, or Americans. They're bacteria.
For a trip into
bacteria's "creative web,"
click on photo above.

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