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

Writing for the layman, evolutionist Bloom, argues for an interpretation of group evolution which would treat all of evolution and life on earth as the workings of an interspecies mass mind. He compares individual organisms to individual neurons, societal groupings to neural networks, and so on. Much of the work seems to be based on analogy, for instance when he points to a study in which birds which failed to master their environment tended to become less socially successful within their flocks and also tended to become less healthy and die earlier. This is then compared to the inefficient neuron, which commits cellular "suicide." The upshot of Bloom's thesis is that sociability, information solving, and problem solving are inherent parts of evolution which have existed since well before what we know as life originated

HOWARD BLOOM, author of the critically acclaimed book The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, is a Visiting Scholar at New York University. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Political Science, and the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, as well as the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project. He has been written up in every edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering since the publication’s inception.