Eine spannende Erzählung über das Leben auf der Erde - von den ersten Mikroben bis hin zur rasanten Ausweitung des Internet. Geschrieben von Howard Bloom, dem berühmten Autor von "The Lucifer Principle". In "Global Brain" stellt er die kontroverse und aufstrebende Theorie der "Gruppenselektion" vor. Er betont, dass in der gesamten Entwicklungsgeschichte des Lebens die Kommunikation und Kooperation zwischen Gruppen mindestens ebenso wichtig war, wie der harte Wettkampf des Stärkeren, den Darwin betonte. Die Gruppentheorie betrachtet das Leben auf der Erde als eine Makrogemeinschaft symbiotischer Organismen, die zum Nutzen aller zusammenarbeiten, d.h. Pflanzen, Tiere und auch der Mensch sind biologisch und emotional miteinander verbunden. Sie haben sich gemeinsam als Komponenten einer weltweiten Lernmaschine entwickelt. Aus dieser Perspektive betrachtet, ähnelt das Netzwerk des Lebens einem riesigen "globalen Gehirn", in dem jeder Organismus ein funktioneller Bestandteil ist, und von dem das World Wide Web nur der neueste Schritt in der Evolution darstellt. Eine interessante und fesselnde Lektüre.

Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century is the follow-up to Howard Bloom's first book, The Lucifer Principle: a Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, which The Washington Post called "a mesmerizing mirror of the human condition" and which Mark Graham of Denver's Rocky Mountain Post labeled ""a philosophical look at the history of our species, which alternated between fascinating and frightening. Reading it was like reading Dean Koontz or Stephen King: I couldn't put it down." The Lucifer Principle was a shock to those who believe that the greed of genes turns us into selfish loners, but Global Brain: the Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century will come as an even bigger surprise. It presents evidence that this cosmos has been "social" since its first microseconds of existence, and that the first communal intelligence appeared among colonies of cyanobacteria 3.5 billion years ago. These bacteria pioneered the first worldwide research and development system eons before the emergence of women and men. Global Brain follows the evolution of individual and mass minds from the multi-trillion member collaborations among our bacterial ancestors to the ten-thousand-strong mass marches and claw-to-claw showdowns of Mesozoic spiny lobsters. It demonstrates how the first birds of the Jurassic age gathered in flocks and how their descendants were so tightly data-linked that cultural fads could spread hundreds of miles through the avian grapevine in a matter of mere days.
Underpinning Global Brain's rewrite of the evolutionary saga is a new approach to social theory, one derived not from abstract principles but from observation of the real thing--living communities of all kinds--including the most fascinating of the lot: societies of human minds. Global Brain probes the rise of Stone Age cities thousands of years before Ur and Babylon, and explores how these little-known urban centers changed the very nature of human identity. It shows how transnational subcultures arose in Greece a hundred years before the glory days of Athens, and how these havens for unconventional men and women transformed the mechanism of collective creativity. Then Global Brain reveals how the sometimes brutal political stances promoted by Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato still struggle for dominance at the turn of the 21st century.
Global Brain presents evidence that the shared intelligence of humankind is part of a larger planetary mind, one that combines the learning of microbes, waterfowl, predatory cats, idealists, militants, religionists, and scientists. The book predicts that the great world war of the 21st century will take place between the collective intelligence of humanity and that of a world wide web 96 trillion generations old and billions of years wise-the global internet between microbial societies. Finally, Global Brain anticipates some of the creative paths this planet's team of battlers and borrowers may take during the next hundred and fifty years.