The Global Brain

The Universe is not chaotic or without meaning; quite the contrary. The story of life, particularly, is a story of a struggle upwards, toward intelligence. This is plainly not a Darwinian explanation of evolution. In support of his outlook, Mr. Bloom refers to Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob (sp?) in the preamble to Chapter 2 :

This reference piqued my curiosity, so I did a search on "Ben-Jacob" in Science (subscription required) and came up with a single reference: Parrish and Edelstein-Keshet, "Complexity, Pattern, and Evolutionary Trade-Offs in Animal Aggregation," (Science 2 April 1999:Vol. 284. no. 5411, pp. 99 - 101). In footnote 19, that article refers to "E. Ben-Jacobs [sic] and H. Levine, Sci. Am.279, 56 (1998 )" when discussing "Evolutionary Functions" as follows:

In view of the prediction of complexity theory that patterns emerge as epiphenomena in the inanimate world, it is hard to argue the case that all animal aggregations have a functional purpose. Numerous examples of strikingly beautiful aggregations form spontaneously through combined physical forces and individual properties, with no clear evolutionary benefit or drive. Currents, eddies, convergent zones, and other fluid dynamic phenomena can result in patchy and highly clumped distributions of organisms (18). Other examples such as branching morphology in bacteria colonies (19) occur under specific, possibly contrived, laboratory settings. Pattern and structure can arise as epiphenomena through nonlinear interactions, whether or not the units are alive, and whether a purpose exists or not (20). Aggregation can also be the result of individuals assorting uniformly relative to resource availability and quality, with the result that high-quality patches have the densest groups (21). Once convened, biological factors such as predation can operate as selective agents for the maintenance of emergent properties of the aggregation--including group size, shape, and architecture--and the constraint of membership (as the cost of straggling is often death).

In other words, the appearance of pattern or order does not necessarily have any purpose; i.e., it is not designed. This is an important point most people overlook. The notorious 'Argument by Design,' which is now being pushed on the public by religious fundamentalists, errs in alleging an order in a thing which is, in fact, an order discovered in it by the observer. That Mr. Bloom found order in the universe and evolution is an interesting fact about the author, but is not necessarily a fact of nature.

According to Bloom, there are five principles which govern events since the beginning, conformity enforcement, diversity generation, inner-judgement, resource shifting and inter-group tournaments. (cf. pp. 46 ff) The following chapters contain several anecdotes which explain these principles, one at a time. "Conformity enforcement" is any mechanism by which a given order is preserved; e.g., genetic inheritance. "Diversity generation" is any mechanism by which deviations from the given order come about; e.g., genetic mutation. "Resource shifting" means those mechanisms by which winners take all, which Mr. Bloom repeatedly defines by citing a saying of the Christian Jesus. "Intergroup tournaments" means, simply, competition.

Taken together those four principles really amount to two: inheritance and competition. The first two principles are about how things remain the same or not. The second two are about struggle and its resolution. The principle of competition is simply that everything in nature struggles to survive; i.e., nature is a war of each against all. All disputes under that Hobbesian premise are settled by the rule, 'winner takes all,' or 'might makes right' in the moral and political worlds. Because of competition, things remain the same or not; i.e., successful competition is a precondition of inheritance. But inheritance is not the same thing as competition, as it is not completely determined by competition. The repositories of inheritance, such as genes in living things, do not directly compete and are rarely tested in toto.

Here, I think it worth noting that the foregoing "principles" could be considered restatements of Darwin's theories. In Darwinian evolution, there is a struggle for survival in which only the "fittest" succeed; i.e., there is a winner take all competition. Darwin did not know how it happened - genes had not yet been discovered - but he proposed that offspring had the qualities of their parents; i.e., there was inheritance. Darwin also thought that, somehow, those inherited qualities changed gradually through the generations. This sort of thinking parallels physical ideas about motion, in which there is potential (inherited) and kinetic (competitive) energy. Darwin connects the reservoir with its outflow, the world in motion, using the idea that the successful get to reproduce. (This last is even consistent with the statistical notion that competitors reproduce in proportion to their success.)

So far, I could take Mr. Bloom's five points as a clever version of Darwin. I left "inner judgement" to last, as this is the most mysterious of the five principles and the one which makes Mr. Bloom non-Darwinian. Mr. Bloom proposes that each entity, organic and inorganic, has some sort of mind or intelligence. Entities are capable of proposed hypotheses and then acting on them. If they are successful in their endeavors, they reap all the rewards and reproduce mightily. If not, they self-destruct. In Mr. Bloom's curious world, failure is not punished by natural conditions; rather, failed entities actually program their own death. In examples about bacteria, he claims the bacteria that fail in their colonial attempts not only commit suicide, but generate (chemical) signals to warn away other bacteria.

"Inner judgement" is a way of importing intentionality - purpose - into the stuff of the universe and organic beings. In Bloom's description, organisms have a mechanism by which they form "hypotheses" about their environment and then make a decision which hypothesis to carry out as an "experiment." If the experiment succeeds, they celebrate; if not, they wither and die. This attribution of inner judgement to entities, living and otherwise, is critical to Bloom's thesis, that there is a "global brain." As he says in Chapter 20, "Interspecies Global Mind,"

The global brain is not just human, made of our vaunted intelligence. It is webbed between all species. A mass mind knits the continents, the seas, and the skies. It turns all creatures great and small into probers, crafters, innovators, ears and eyes. This is the real global brain, the truest planetary mind. (p. 207)

He follows that introduction with this Biblical-Lincolnesque sentence, "A mere five hundred thousand years after the earth took form there set forth upon this orb a global brain." (p. 207) He concludes the chapter with, "For all that lives and all that ever has is part of a collective brain, a neural net of the most sprawling kind ... an evolution driven worldwide multibillion-year-old interspecies mind." Those statements put Bloom far outside the Darwinian enclave, and out of the scientific community as well. Why? Because I cannot think of any way his statements would be tested or refuted.

The flaw in Bloom's book is simply that it proposes an all-encompassing explanation. Anything can be explained by his model. It is indeed a Theory of Just Everything. The problem with such theories is the lack of useful prediction: how do I determine what comes next? Since, as in Hegel's Theory of History, there is synthesis, anti-thesis and resolution, sometimes one thing winning and sometimes another, it is impossible to know what the outcome of each test will be unless one posits an overall goal or purpose of History. For Bloom, that purpose is the production of global intelligence, whatever that is. Bloom does not define it, nor can we know the eventual result, because only the evolution of the universe will produce it. Without that final knowledge, it is impossible to determine whether any particular development is in the "right" direction. Nonetheless, Bloom discerns the global mind at work in nature.

I don't recommend the book. I think it was popular in salons and coffee shops for a time, but its day has passed.