This morning we feature part twelve of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together, 6) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind, 7) Tools of Perception and the Construction of Reality, Reality is a Shared Hallucination, 9) The Conformity Police, 10) The Huddle and the Squabble, 11) Ice and Fire. Reposted from Telepolis.

The Dance of Attractors and Repulsors

Howard Bloom

In the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang two kinds of forces revealed themselves – attraction and repulsion. The repulser of explosion began a rush apart which hasn’t ended to this day. Its aftermath is an “expansionary universe” separating stars and galaxies at breakneck speed. Then there are the forces of attraction – those which pulled together quarks in threesomes, linked atomic shells to produce molecules, then sucked masses of these interlocks into the swirls we see as galaxies, stars, and human beings. Physicists are still debating whether attraction or repulsion will have the final word. But the fact is, repulsion and attraction are not battling to the death, but twining in continuous tango.

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

This morning we feature part eleven of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together, 6) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind, 7) Tools of Perception and the Construction of Reality, Reality is a Shared Hallucination, 9) The Conformity Police, 10) The Huddle and the Squabble. Reposted from Telepolis.

Ice and Fire 

Howard Bloom

There is a power in the push and pull of opposites. Gravity’s shackle fights momentum’s fleeing force to keep a planet racing on the circle of its course. The battle between flexor and extensor muscles gives a strongman might to lift the front end of a car. Inhalation and exhalation vivify the lungs. Compression and expansion pound the heart to pump a tank-truck-full of blood a day. At Ice Age’s end, sociality would draw men and women into conformity chambers of unprecedented size. One byproduct would be conformity’s antithesis – diversity – surging ideas at ferocious speed into the arteries of the inter-human brain. Old networks would give way to new, hastening the pace at which the fuel of concepts from afar would kindle flares of fire in the furnace of mass mind.

Roughly 130,000 years ago, the diversity generator drove tribes to run an artificial crease down their centers, sorting shoulder-rubbing neighbors into two opposing groups. These primordial forms of fabricated cleavage, known to anthropologists as moieties, were apparently a way to keep the deformities of inbreeding at bay.

The members of a moiety were forbidden to marry each other, but were forced to pick their mates from among the members of the competing coterie, no matter how distasteful that prospect eventually may have seemed. For moieties soon showed earliest man’s ability to build mountains of separation from molehills of similarity. If one moiety identified itself with day, its pouting Siamese twin would declare itself an avatar of night. If one chose to be summer, the other marked itself as winter. If one was earth, the other was defiant sky.

Such hair-splitting snowballed in pre-history. After moieties came clans. Clan members believed they were descended from an animal or plant whose powers they bore. In a sense each member of a Bear clan was half man and half bear.

Clan members were not allowed to kill and eat their ancestral animal or plant – their “totem” – except on sacred occasions. Each totem was one of the dietary staples of the entire tribe. The result: each clan was forced to specialize in a different menu, and to preserve the animals and plants which fed the members of rival clans. Clans of this nature were so universal that they existed in early Australia and among the Siberian immigrants who trekked across the Bering Straits siring “native” American tribes from the Tlingit of the Pacific coast to the Iroquois near the Atlantic sea.

But all of this was prelude to the subdivisions which would later brew diversity. Roughly 10,000 years ago, there arose a whole new kind of pressure cooker for the sweet-and-sour opposites of conformity and diversity. This was the neolithic city.

The neolithic City

Intergroup tournaments like war, ambush and raids have long boosted the ingenuity of even bacteria’s social brains. A human tribe that did well in the recurrent fray could bully its neighbors mercilessly. A tribe less able to spit forth fresh stratagems was likely to be plundered or simply wiped away. Cities were a quantum leap in tactical defense – offering almost impregnable sanctuary from the prospect of a violent death.

The founders of Jericho, surrounded by ramparts and three-story high stone towers, constructed this radically new form of protective complex 10,000 years ago. Jericho’s mortarless boulder walls, built when most humans were still living in huts and caves, were 6.5 feet thick and four times the height of a neolithic man. They were surrounded by a trench nine feet deep and 27 feet wide. This invention of a town wall protected by lookout towers would still be used ten millennia later in the age of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Conformity enforcers such as the need to flock helped cities come to be. The palisades which kept invaders out held citizens tightly in, compressing them into a common mold. All shared a common reservoir of language, mode of thought, cultural reflex, religion and ritual. Yet urban life heightened the generation of diversity. Author Dora Jane Hamblin and Harvard archaeologist C.C.Lamberg-Karlovsky feel that one lure of packing like sardines into the urban can was, ironically, the opportunity to express oneself. “A variety of roles,” they write, “awaited the man – and woman – of the city.

The city, in fact, depended on variety. Its concentration of numbers was possible only because its residents performed specialized duties that would be supported by the larger society of which the city was a part. But the possibility of specialized occupations, in turn, made the city attractive. No longer was every man forced to be a hunter or a farmer, every woman a mother and housekeeper. In the city – from the time of the very first cities – there were trade goods to be manufactured, commerce to be conducted, shrines to be tended [and]… massive construction projects to be undertaken…..” There were also walls of plastered brick to be covered with artwork, patterned rugs to be woven, pottery to be made from strips of clay, jewelry to be crafted from limestone, from imported shells, and from the teeth of deer, and makeup to be ground and mixed from red ocher and green and blue minerals brought from far away.

The walls of Jericho couldn’t have been built without the division of labor, fine-tuned organization, and excess time which dripped like honey from the bustle of a civic hive. Hamblin and Lamberg-Karlovsky add that “the tantalizing variety of city life, offering the possibility of following a personal bent rather than a parent’s footsteps, must have been as powerful a lure in 8000 B.C. as in the 20th Century A.D.”

	Catal Huyuk

The plains of the middle east on which cities saw first light had been freed from the frigid sparseness of the Ice Age. The thaw made this vast expanse an Eden. Not only did toothsome plants flourish in quantities modern humans had never been able to find, but deer, wild sheep, pigs and other roaming steaks and chops were thick as ants on a melon rind. A hunter could bag more meat in a day than his glacier-age forefathers, combing lands sucked dry by sheets of ice, could manage to sniff out in a month.

Tell Mureybit was a village of stone houses established in Syria 10,000 years ago. The fabled “abundance of farming’s harvest” which allegedly allowed the flowering of cities would have been a waste of time. The residents feasted on wild grain and ate the animals they brought down with their bows. Even Jericho’s monumental builders banqueted on wild seeds and the flesh of charging beasts.

A handful of eccentrics tamed tall grasses and sought the secrets of harnessing vegetation’s genes. Through breeding, these fanatics nudged the hollow stems of einkorn wheat into bearing not three to six scrawny seeds but between 20 and 100 bulging starch-and-protein packs. A single stalk could now produce 40 times as much food as a dozen or more of its feral progenitors.

Some men and women laid out former hunting and foraging land in plots and cultivated the new crops. Others learned to use the conformity enforcers which hold a grip on social animals. Taking advantage of a beast’s need to follow a leader and subordinate itself to a superior, these inventive keepers gentled sheep, goats and dogs into following convenient paths. The pioneering pastoralists could now nab a plenitude of meat, milk and wool without the risky and often fruitless pursuit of the hunt.

Catal Huyuk

Yet Neolithic religion testified to the way in which hunting and the killing power of an animal’s armaments still obsessed the early city-dwellers. Nearly nine thousand years ago, one out of three rooms in Catal Huyuk was a shrine. None bore agricultural motifs – sheaves of grain or harvest emblems. The centers of the sacred’s walls carried mural after mural of men with bow and arrow bringing down herds of fleeing deer.

	Bull sculpture, Catal Huyuk

But the most overwhelming symbols paid homage to the animals these fledgling pastoralists were still struggling to tame. Each tabernacle was filled with the skulls of long horned bulls aligned in overpowering majesty. Horned skulls flared from the walls, were painted full-size on the plaster, and were installed for maximum effect on rigid benches over which their white weapons swept and curved, aiming points directly at the chests of standing worshippers. The men of the middle east had only recently domesticated the wild ox, Bos taurus, an animal seven feet high at the shoulders whose horns might reach ten feet above the ground. Untamed males of this plains species would step forward from a hard-won harem, lower their heads and disembowel humans who dared to assail them with the irritation of a spear. These confrontations would have been vivid in the minds of the Catal Huyukans, who still hunted the bull’s wild relatives, aurochs, and stuffed their storerooms with venison by tracking down Red Deer. The barely subjugated descendants of the Bos taurus oozed a strength and potency beyond that of the human male. Even a modern domesticated bull – whose size has been decreased and whose temperament has been softened by roughly 800 generations of selective breeding – is easily provoked to charge with murderous force against the wisp of “mighty” man.

	Reconstruction of a shrine

British anthropologist Chris Knight is certain neolithic females deliberately withdrew their carnal favors to prod men into hauling home fresh meat. No wonder the horned heads which could so easily split the rib cage of an owner were painted next to women with their legs spread wide in sexual invitation, pregnancy, or birth, and between plaster wall moldings of round, full breasts whose nipples yawned with teeth and jaws or expressed their obdurate “no’s” via actual bird beaks and animal tusks emerging from the nipples’ centers. Other paintings underscored the fierce edge females gain from their fecundity by portraying yet more open-crotched women, knees splayed outward from their hips – with their arms resting on the bodies of leopards. These images carried contrapuntal meanings. They shrieked the slashing pain of sexual denial while roaring with an appetite for sexual savagery.

Goddesses, the archaeologists call the ladies of the wall paintings and of numerous full-bellied figurines. But we have no way to know if that is what they were. The suggestion of the decor was clear. Bulls had a power to pierce the walls of feminine refusal. This awed male humans with their far smaller penises and infinitely tinier bulk and might. Men, so easily cowed by womanly disdain, could only worship and hope to gain the thrust of a bull’s horns and enormous phallus penetrating vaginas with vast overloads of sperm. It was the bull who could truly make children grow in a grudging damsel’s womb.

Despite its evocations of lust, strife, torment and the wild, religion was used to synchronize the emotions and the symbol set of those who lived within the city’s walls. This fervid enticement to cohesion and to the discipline of ritual geared the members of a town to think and work in harmony.

Meanwhile, the diversity generators of pride and peculiar environment prodded each city to devise its own approach to survival and to the gathering of wealth. One example came in the contrast between a pair of towns on the Turkish Konya Plains eight thousand years ago. Catal Huyuk was in an area rich in wild herds which included not only aurochs and deer, but the pig Sus scrofa. To harvest this abundance of galloping groceries, the Catal Huyukans were big game hunters par excellence. Their stone-tool industry specialized in weapons to bring down large prey – long spearheads, arrowheads, daggers and the like. But not far away lay the village of Suberde, whose surroundings presented a different menu: wild ass, wild sheep, and the mid-to-small-sized Roe and Fallow Deer, augmented by such relatively minuscule game as fox and wolf. The flint and obsidian crafters of Suberde devised weapons very different from those of Catal Huyuk, miniaturized for small-target precision. Even Suberde’s arrowheads were an unusual pattern designed for compactness and for exacting accuracy.

Networks through trade

Each town offered its particular package of technology, raw materials and technique. Such options hit mass circulation ten thousand years ago, when the multi-million-year-old commerce between tribes exploded dramatically. Additional cities sprang up to provide food, shelter, and good service on the paths men used to swap the wares of obsidian-mining and tool-making towns with the products of those rich in salt, pottery, cloth and the red coloring-material hematite, or with rarities from the south central Russian hubs of copper and lapis lazuli.

The cascade of merchandise drew distant centers into a commercial web. Oasis hubs like Jericho provided accommodations and water channeled from underground wells through stone aqueducts to exhausted and thirsting tradesmen pounding the now-permanent exchange routes; and Catal Huyuk – with its hundreds of worship rooms – offered solace to passing merchants filled with uncertainty and anxious to draw fresh guidance from the gods. From 5500 bc to 2500 bc, the middle east’s overlapping trade networks in obsidian inched the 1,500 miles from Crete’s city of Knossos – eventual birthplace of Greek civilization – to Bahrain, where the Persian Gulf reaches toward the Indian Ocean. But these trade loops were a mere beginning. Obsidian in the ancient Asian city of Hattusas has been traced to Africa’s Ethiopia, 2,500 miles away. Iranian cities like the 6,500 year old Tepe Yahya were pivot points for the transport of goods from India to Mesopotamia.

	Walls of Jericho

A city could not survive without the nourishment provided by a web of planters and animal domesticators in its outstretched locality. Nor could it thrive without a flow of foreigners delivering essential rarities. The tongue-and-groove relationship between distant minilopolises triggered a cross fire of ideas, methods and styles, swelling the pool of choices within a city even further than before. Each approach was tossed into a continent-crossing whirl of notions which cosmopolites could tap, test, adapt and frequently recast. The conformity enforcer made cultures ape each others imitatively. The diversity generator ensured that the mix in circulation was perpetually swelled.

Methods and perspectives spread across amazing distances. Some archaeologists have proposed that the civilizations of Greece and Israel and the agriculture which vivified all of Europe got their start in Catal Huyuk. Even Egypt, some experts declare, adapted its knack for soil-cultivation from Catal Huyuk and the other Asian cities with which the settlers of the Nile were bartering their wares.

Meanwhile roughly 450 miles away, another complex of prehistoric towns – the Ubaidian minilopolises of southern Mesopotamia – exported the know-how of their cultures up the Tigris, Euphrates and Karkheh-Karun rivers to the remote coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The later city states of the Tigris and Euphrates would, in turn, catapult their wares and myths 1,400 miles east to the Harappan civilization in Pakistan, probably picking up ideas from the early civic snarls of the Indus River in their turn.

Cities as neural ganglions

All of this heralded the coming of a global brain. A city was like a neural ganglion, a center of collaborating ecologies. Catal Huyuk built its edifices and many of its finest works of art from oak and juniper, yet had no trees in its vicinity. All were felled on hillsides far away and floated down the river to satisfy the city’s needs. The fir from which were carved the elegant adornments gracing sacred alters and the best homes came from the Taurus mountains, as did epicurean delicacies like almonds, pistachio, apples, acorns (good not only for feed but as raw material for leather tanning chemicals and for yoghurt making), and berries like juniper and the wine makers’ favorite, hackberry.

Other mountains closer by provided greenstone, limestone and volcanic rock. Catal Huyuk’s alabaster and calcite came from Kayseri, and its creamy white marble from lands far to the west. Its cinnabar was imported from Sizma, and its shells from Mediterranean beaches many miles and mountain ranges to the south. Salt, one of the greatest lacers of distant cultures into nets of trade, came from Ihcapmar, whose industry was based on the mineral gifts of a nearby brackish lake. There is no flint on the Turkish plateau where Catal Huyuk is located, yet the citizens of the town used the finest varieties of this stone to manufacture daggers with serrated blades and everyday utensils to start the kitchen fire or to scrape skins for the leather industry. On the other hand, the Catal Huyukans ignored the multi-colored cherts which could be obtained nearby. Still more exotic semi-gems like rock crystal, carnelian and jasper came from such unfamiliar locations that archaeologists have not yet pinned their sources down. All were fodder for Catal Huyuk’s most value-added artisans. Some maestros made ordinary implements into status symbols for far-flung elites, creating the finest in weaponry, in sickle blades for wealthy farmers, in chisels and gouges for the upscale carver of wood and bone, and in prestige knives with finely sculpted wooden hilts and pommels of the choicest chalk.

Then there were the luxury items from the town’s master obsidian polishers: bowls of awesome grace, make-up trays and rings. Adding to the extravagance was the output of artistes in shell work: wonderfully colored necklaces, armlets, bracelets, and anklets. Meanwhile, virtuosos carvers worked with horn and bone, covering boar tusks with geometric designs, and fashioning fine-tipped make-up applicators, kitchen goods like cups, spoons and ladles, wrist guards for bowmen and hooks and eyelets to fasten belts. Pottery, so prominent in other cultures, was apparently a sop for the poor. “Mass-produced” into containers of all kinds, its forms imitated the workmanship of items with “traditional prestige” -those painstakingly crafted of wood and basket-weave.

Each extravagance strutted the stuff of the complex adaptive system’s resource shifters, which shuttled wealth and influence to those whose work appeared majestic and away from those whose contributions seemed mundane. Though early cities like Catal Huyuk had up to 35 acres of straight-lined, low-slung, flat-roofed, brick housing complexes, each nuclear family’s two-room suite was completely self-contained, walled off from the others for privacy and equipped with its own kitchen and sitting and sleeping nooks. Despite the nearly identical layouts of their apartments and the fact that each dwelling was sandwiched wall-to-wall between those on either side, the citizens of Catal Huyuk took petty divisions between groups of neighbors a good deal further than did the still wandering tribes of Mesolithic hunters, with their simplistic separations between moieties and clans.

In tribal society, each member had been a generalist. Even the shaman presumably had known the arts of tracing prey and other disciplines essential for day to day survival. But a city provided the luxury of concentrating on a single field, then of walling oneself off with those who shared one’s metier. Catal Huyuk’s shrines, as we’ve said before, filled one out of every three apartments in the sprawling complexes. The plethora of priests were a pampered elite. They lived in their own part of town, apparently inhabited more spacious buildings than their fellow citizens, and deigned to purchase the finer things in life from the bead maker and weaver sweating in the marketplace. The complex adaptive system’s resource shifters and utility sorters shovelled privilege to these intercessors with divinity.

None of the 200 priestly quarters excavated during the first two years of the Catal Huyuk dig (which admittedly, only covered a few neighborhoods in a very large town) showed any signs of home-industry. Priests had no sickles for reaping crops and grain, yet they were gluttonous gourmets, savoring fourteen different kinds of delicacies – from wheat, barley and peas to apples, almonds, beer and wine, along with the meat of game and in all probability honey and such elegant milk products as butter and cheese. The servitors of the supernatural had no looms, yet their homes were rich in cloths and draperies. They possessed no implements for crafting finished stone, yet their household treasures included ceremonial weapons of polished obsidian graced with intricate carved handles depicting such whimsies as the entwinement of a pair of snakes. Priests admired themselves in obsidian mirrors. Their jewelry contained beads with holes too fine for penetration by a needle made of modern steel. These perks of holiness were the most lavish since the dawn of human artistry. No wonder country tribes deserted “indigenous culture,” headed toward the towns, and sought to make their fortunes in previously unheard-of ways.

Specialiazation and competition between groups

Like the Ice Agers who’d sealed themselves in arbitrary moieties, pioneering urbanites subdivided into pockets of exclusivity. Each of Catal Huyuk’s neighborhoods was for artisans of just one kind – weavers had their district, potters another. This cliquishness gone awry swiftly upped the subtlety of the collective brain. We discussed in a previous episode how each fissioning group forms its own peculiar ways, its own view of the world, its own emotional stance, and even its own gene pool. Fission takes a different shape when contained within a city’s walls. Groups may set their boundaries, but they do not march off to start afresh in distant territory. Instead, each adds to the repertoire of tactics bubbling in the public mind.

Biologist and cultural observer Lewis Thomas might have called the contribution boiled up by each group to demonstrate its “specialness” another hypothesis available should others fail. But subcultures do not meekly wait for the day when their chosen system may save the day. Instead all compete like soccer teams for top rung in power and prestige. This claustrophobic contest jolts city life into a soaring progress that would have dizzied earlier Stone Age bands. But more about the surprises which would pop from subcultural gamesmanship in later chapters. Let’s return to nitty gritty.

Judging from what we know of early Sumer, Greece and Rome, the spokesmen of what passed for gods in Catal Huyuk surely had an attitude restricted to their clique, a priestly hoard of creeds which justified their wealth, aloofness, and disdain for toil. Rival subcultures, those of the butchers, bakers and tanners, would have coveted their own realms of expertise, their own emotional postures, and their own peculiar ways of getting at the “truth.”

The group in charge would dominate mass consciousness, dictating which manners of perception, dress and speech were allowed and which were thoroughly outrÈ. If a crisis arose and the reigning elite seemed helpless to turn catastrophe aside, other microgroups would vie for number one. The winner – often the subculture whose mode of operation could best defang the threat – would become the next maker of the group’s mind, the arbiter of what was chic and what was not, of how to think, talk, walk and decorate oneself. The more subcultures, the greater the playbook of vying strategies, and the brighter a community’s combinatorial craftiness.

Through all of these advances, from the axons of trade to the dendrites of diversity, synapses were forming for a faster interhuman brain than any deployed before by multicellular organisms. As early as 6,000 BC, we can see the birth of a new modernity – the evolving blueprint for whole new forms of future interactivity.

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

Dr. Thomas Gordon was an important pioneer in “win-win” science. His most popular book was Parent Effectiveness Training.  This morning we feature one of Gordon’s students.

Can “win-win” be a Losing Proposition?

Joe Wilmot

I don’t like losing. Not that I’m a sore loser who can’t stand the idea of another person beating me in the spirit of friendly competition, but when someone forces their solution to a problem on me it just feels lousy. I think it’s pretty safe to say that just about everybody else feels the same: No one likes losing.

Some people hate losing so much that they try every tactic at their disposal to insure they win, even if it’s at the expense of other peoples’ losing. Others may feel that it’s okay to win at others’ expense if they’re doing the “right thing.” No matter what the reason, whenever someone wins at the expense of someone else’s losing, someone’s left behind feeling resentful. Think about the cost of that resentfulness in our interactions with our spouses, children, co-workers, vendors, customers, etc. If we no longer fully engage (or alter the way we engage) others for fear of losing “yet again,” you can imagine the high cost when others lose our cooperation.

For many years now the idea of win-win has gained lots of popularity. “The world is a rich place, plentiful in its resources, there’s always more than one way to solve a problem,” say its proponents—but is that really true? Can a win-win solution to every single problem be sought, found and implemented successfully?

I seriously don’t think so.

Many people agree, and because they do they’re willing to resort to win-lose problem-solving at times. “That’s just the way the world works,” they say, or “I don’t have time to negotiate endlessly.” Without a formula for brainstorming, selecting, evaluating and choosing mutually acceptable solutions—and without the language skills that allow people to be real clear about their needs—win-win becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible. And if not clearly impossible, at least impossible when you have serious time constraints.

It had always bugged me that Dr. Gordon chose to name his conflict resolution model “No-Lose” instead of the catchy and positive-sounding “Win-Win.” But I also never thought about win-win critically until I heard our president, Linda Adams, explaining it to someone:

We don’t teach win-win because win-win just isn’t always possible. There will be times when you can’t find more than one solution to a problem and that someone will have to give in. The idea behind our No-Lose model, then, is not saying that every party will always get her/his needs met. But when people are able to communicate clearly and openly about needs, then there are ways to reach a friendly compromise. Maybe one party doesn’t technically win this time, but he or she also hasn’t lost.

That subtle distinction makes all the difference in the world.

I’m reminded of a story told to us by a client of GTI’s, John Dietz of Miller-Valentine Group. They’d had a huge conflict in which some people had proposed the closure of one of their divisions. Obviously, the person in charge of that division didn’t want it to close, so he had some very strong feelings about it. In John’s own words:

A while back we were looking at the possibility of eliminating one of our construction companies. Each was a division within the company. The process wasn’t going too well—it was rocky.

I introduced the idea of using L.E.T.’s 6-step problem-solving process [The No-Lose Method]. It went from rocky and combative to peoples’ getting their feelings out into the open. Once all the information was on the table, the head of Division II actually voted to dissolve his own division. He stated that he’d felt heard and fairly dealt with, and that he was able to vote on the dissolution of his own division with a clear conscience—it was a strategic issue, not a personal one. I attribute the success of this situation entirely to the 6-step process.

The real loss of win-win is that there are people out there who—rightly—just don’t think it’s always possible to achieve it. Because of this conviction they’re likely to continue using win-lose (if they’re the ones winning, of course) and to reap the consequences of others’ feeling resentment towards them.

The real advantage of No-Lose is that it’s a completely different posture. It’s realistic in that it acknowledges that compromise is a necessary component of human interaction. But it also acknowledges that compromise can work when every party feels understood, respected, and when there’s a feeling that there is reciprocity in the relationship.

This morning we feature part ten of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together, 6) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind, 7) Tools of Perception and the Construction of Reality, Reality is a Shared Hallucination, 9) The Conformity Police. Reposted from Telepolis.

The Huddle and the Squabble

Howard Bloom

In previous episodes we’ve focussed on two kinds of conformity enforcers: ones which shape brains to work in harmony, sculpting our vision,hearing and attention so that we comprehend the world in a similar way; and others which goad individuals to tailor their behavior and appearance to the standards of the tribe. Conformity gives the complex adaptive system, the social group, its stability.But to adapt, the system needs a hefty dollop of something else: novelty. The ability to bend, stretch, and create comes not from the conformity enforcers but from their indispensable opposites: diversity generators.

Diversity generators show up in many forms. They snake through the inanimate universe, where physicist Paul Davies says there’s no telling “what new levels of variety or complexity may be in store.” Random fluctuations, explains Davies, “are nature’s way of exploring unforeseen possibilities.”

On the living level there’s that old phenomenon called sex. It is a time-consuming, energy-swallowing waste of an organism’s time. But the diversity it produces gives the ability to make gene repairs. This provides sexual organisms with an edge when they’re pummeled by high-energy particles able to snap vital twists of DNA. Some bacteria hang on to chromosomal uniformity – simply splitting in half and giving each daughter a replica of her mother’s genes. Others mix and match their genes with those of a chosen mate. The pay-off comes when the atmosphere fails to protect the micro-beasts against the sun’s toxic ultraviolet waves. Then sexually shuffled bacteria out-survive the neatly uniform non-sexual ones.

Microorganisms beneath the surface of the earth can eat a variety of seeming indigestibles that range from soil to stone … a result of their evolutionary ability to compose an awesome array of variations on the basic cellular theme.

Diversity generators also spin their ways among far larger beasts. Macaque females, like some men and women, can’t resist the appeal of tall, dark strangers from outside their group. The fruit of their seemingly disloyal lust is a gift to the band of the outsider’s genes, whose introduction to the reproductive pool prevents it from becoming stagnant and vulnerable to disease.

But diversity generators are particularly vivacious among human beings.

Bickering, Backstabbing, and the Hatred between Brothers

It is much easier to be friends with a member of the opposite party than a member of one’s own party — for one is not in direct personal competition for office with members of the opposition in the way that one is with one’s colleagues.

Jonathan Lynn, The complete Yes Minister

A powerful form of diversity generator prodded hominids roughly two million years ago. One wave of after another of human ancestors trekked from Africa to China, Southeast Asia and Europe, then as early as 176,000 years ago navigated huge expanses of sea and settled in Australia, where their wanderings began all over again. The forces behind this scatter are murky to us. But it is possible to deduce them from modern evidence.

One of the most powerful diversity generators in humans and animals is a force Freud called “the narcissism of minor difference.” Individuals extremely similar to one another find some petty distinction then bicker about it. To paraphrase Emile Durkheim, a community of saints will classify a bit of lint on the heavenly robes as intolerable and viciously hound those who aren’t lint free. Eventually the supposedly unkempt may seek out others with a casual bent, and wall themselves off as a separate entity free to pursue a messier destiny.

A primitive form of this impulse far precedes humanity. The closer insects are to each other in physical form and habits, the more likely they are to be enemies. The most dangerous foes of ants are other ants. The major adversaries of South American wasps are other South American wasps. And, in general, the greatest threat to each social insect group is not a marauding bird, lizard or mammal. It’s another cluster of social insects. I don’t mean to say that social insects are more ruthless than you and me. They greet each other politely, rush to each others’ rescue, bow meekly to superiors, and even carry each other around. But cannibalistic ants tend to pick their meals from those who most resemble themselves. And parasitic ants sup on hosts who seem their semi-duplicates. A major reason: insects with the same shape, size and tastes have a yen for the same nest sites, food and foraging space, so they’re willing to battle for these prizes … sometimes to the death.

Like many forms of turmoil, this conflict between clones has a creative side. If a passel of nearly identical animals is cooped up on a common turf, it frequently splinters into opposing groups which scramble determinedly down opposite evolutionary paths. E. O. Wilson, who brought attention to this phenomenon forty years ago, called it character displacement. The battle over food and lebensraum compels each coterie to chisel its needs from a separate slot in the shared environment. For example a small number of lookalike cichlid fish seems to have found its way to Lake Nyas in Eastern Africa roughly 12,400 years ago. It didn’t take long for the finny explorers to overpopulate the place. As food grew harder to find, squabbles and serious fights probably pushed the population to square off in spatting cliques. The further the groups grew apart, the more different they became. The details of this process are somewhat speculative, but the result is incontestable. Each subgroup developed a crowbar to pry open opportunities others had missed. Some evolved mouths wide enough to swallow armored snails. Others generated thick lips to yank worms from rocks. One diabolical coven acquired teeth like spears, then snatched its rivals’ eyes and swallowed them like cocktail onions. In a geological blink of time what had begun as a small group of semi-carbon copies became 200 separate species – a carnival of variety.

This is probably how the wandering of Homo erectus got its start. Pre-human clans, like cichlids, hit the carrying-capacity of their environment, then budded off in search of untapped openings. For example, the Yanomamo tribes of northwestern Brazil and southern Venezuela swell until they reach 300 members or so, then break into arguments between blood relatives. The quarrels often end in violence, convincing a fed-up group of malcontents to start a new life somewhere else.

The tendency of those alike to fight when times get tough defies a cardinal rule of conventional evolutionary theory – that the closer creatures are in the composition of their genes, the more they will help each other. The violation is particularly strong in the battle of brother against brother. Species of genetically related ants are, in E.O. Wilson’s words, “the least likely to tolerate each other’s presence.” The same sometimes applies to human beings. On his way through the Alps to spring his surprise attack on Rome, Hannibal ran across two groups of Gauls on the verge of battle. The problem? A pair of brothers were fighting over who would head the tribe. Among Yanomamo, the biggest battles are between family members – and between the groups they head. A fine example of the narcissism of minor difference.

Fission’s Frying Pans

When the going gets tough, the diversity generators get going. At the beginning of this series we described bacterial colonies whose members found a food bonanza then signalled for companion and stranger alike to gather ’round. But as the food ran out, the bacteria’s chemical communiquÇs spat a less gregarious message: “keep your distance – get away.” The bacterial principle winds throughout the chain of life.

Cues that a once-cozy environment is no longer working out make humans chafe and urge to separate. Some people become hostile when jostled from their comfortable routine and hit with the sort of high anxiety task which crops up as the sledding gets rough. Others simply slide into a foul state of mind. Research shows that folks in good moods are generally quite genial. But when their moods turn sour, they snarl and pout, convincing their acquaintances to get the heck away. Show modern men and women a depressing film, and when it’s over, they’ll avoid each other. But these are not just individual propensities. Law and order break down in a society whose social bonds are sawed apart by stress.

Starvation and despair are clues that a group has burned out its niche in a major way. But smaller signs that a community’s grip is slipping can also shatter social unity. The hotter it gets the more the violence between humans goes up. When experimenters slid the thermometer regulating a test room from balmy to unbearable, the sweating inhabitants grew increasingly eager to torment each other with electrical shocks. Unfortunately when some modern humans feel the heat, they vent their frustration with guns or knives. For example, the American race riots of the 60s took place on extremely hot days.

Air pollution, noise, and broadcasts of bad news also ratchet up the level of animosity. Disappearance of essentials which maintain our quality of life impacts not only on the way we act, but the way we see and hear each other too. If a couple is having problems and one member attempts to do something nice, his mate is likely to interpret the soothing gesture as a veiled attack. What’s more, people are generally friendly when their energy is high and cantankerous when their internal fuel runs low. So it’s easy to imagine that the putrid odor, lack of food, and constant bad news at an overused Homo erectus campsite could have had all of these rancorous effects two million years ago.

A community of bacteria react to the insults of harsh circumstance by fragmenting in groups whose flight from each other leads to unexplored horizons. A similar irritability was almost certainly among the blows that splintered pre-humans into offshoots which finally spread across three continents.

Culture’s Centrifuge

The ancient wanderers remained connected in a rough communal mind. But conformity enforcers kept that group brain rather slow. Hand scrapers, choppers, cleavers and other stone basics stayed pretty much alike during the two million years when upright walkers fanned out toward distant coasts. Though clans were now separated by nearly ten thousand miles, habit, tradition and inter-group communication kept them flaking their weapons and household utensils in very much the same way. Only a scattering of isolated groups like the Homo erectus of Java and the archaic Homo sapiens of Southern England managed to lose synch with an occasional new sensation like the Acheulean hand axe.

Then 130,000 years ago diversity generators rumbled with hints of future change as proto-humans in Africa collected color pigments and rhinestones apparently to use in ceremony. One hundred and twenty thousand years ago, the ante went up. At Terra Amata in France inhabitants gathered a palette of 75 tints spanning the spectrum from yellow to red and brown. Between 77,000 and 60,000 bc early humans in Australia were engraving rows of symbolic circles in the local stone. By roughly 40,000 bc, fresh inventions began to shower onto the scene: among them the spear thrower, which more than doubled a spear’s range, plus the barbed harpoon and an early form of hook and tackle known as the fish gorge which together opened the food lockers of the rivers and the seas. New equipment made it easy to follow animal herds and enjoy meat meals whenever you had a Big Mac attack.

There were social breakthroughs too. Scattered families came together for large scale projects suddenly made possible by the rain of new hardware. Slaughtering an entire herd of reindeer could be done … if you could coordinate enough men to pull it off. Shared rites and festivals knit micro-groups together, unlocking a cornucopia of previously untouchable abundance.

One result was a population explosion. The size of base camps mushroomed. In France, some reached seven acres in size. Encampments had 45-foot huts with a profusion of hearths, true multifamily apartment dwellings. And these huge structures were no longer temporary settlements of perpetual wanderers. They were permanent. Presumably even then, the most dangerous animals in the vicinity were not lions and tigers but, as in the case of ants and wasps, other human beings. This may explain why the Czechoslovakian communities of those days were already fortified with the first palisades.

The narcissism of individual differences slid to warp speed as the ingenuity of humans picked up from crawl to hyperdrive. A host of new creations highlighted the differences between human beings. Decorated clothing, jewelry, body ornaments galore, and splendid hide-covered homes held up by mammoth tusks and bones distinguished the loftier members of a tribe from the low. Archaeologist A. Gilman suspects that each newly-gathered populace wanted to monopolize its own herd or favorite hunting spot – like a narrow pass through which masses of migrating mastodon or reindeer might trot each season.

Humans needed ways to proclaim their monopoly of such valuable property.Other hunting animals could use urine and musk glands to spray their territories with specialized scents. This was an ability our ancestors no longer possessed. So they found a host of crude but clever substitutes. As early as 70,00 years ago, some recontoured the skulls of their young with tight bindings and objects that pressed the head into a bizarre and permanent profile. Later on, others filed their teeth into unnatural shapes. All this demonstrated that our group is not like yours so if you value your life it would be wise to keep away.

Forty thousand years later symbolic representation reached a breakneck pace. Primordial writing showed up as early as 27,000 bc. Sculpture and cave painting drove home the differences between one group and another. In all probability, humans used the growing swiftness of their tongues to paint word pictures too – trading stories of the day’s exploits, exchanging opinions about which step to take next in the hunting and gathering of food, and manufacturing myths with which to grasp the mysteries of an often uncontrollable natural world. Our concepts, our words, and our ritual techniques were joined by our style of mural making, our style of carving, and our way of decorating tools as insignia to show who belonged to our group and who belonged to yours.

We’ve sketched in an earlier episode how every culture wires infant and toddler brains in slightly different ways. As groups paraded their uniqueness with distinct dialects, methods, and beliefs, they were likely to have manufactured youngsters who saw the world from starkly different points of view. A ferment of resulting insights and ideas would have enriched the pan-human repertoire. For the intercontinental mind of Pleistocene times was seemingly laced together by a steady growth of trade.

Other differences were likely to have appeared, including one it is currently unfashionable to contemplate – a minor retooling of each band’s genes. Erik Erikson coined the term pseudospeciation to describe the growing sense that group outsiders are subhuman. But pseudospeciation seems to go further than Erikson imagined. Notes David Smillie: “The initial split creates a large genetic difference between the daughter and parent groups.”

It’s easy to see how this could happen. Separating tribes of closely related Yanomamo rapidly set themselves apart by generating new dialects and rituals. In the same way, archaeological remains show that fissioning groups of the Pleistocene generated very different artistry and fashion.

Our previous installment cited the vast evidence that women are captivated by their own culture’s model of the flawless man, and the same women shun the weirdos who can’t seem to get the group norms right. Thus females would have selected mates based on their splinter group’s aesthetic of magnificence, which was likely to have differed defiantly from the ideal exalted by those who had stayed at home two valleys away. The result would have been a Pleistocene sexual resource shift. Men who resembled the new culture’s picture of perfection would have lured more fertile females to their beds and sired more children than the schlubbier members of the tribe.

The resource shifters of status and popularity would have funneled the best food, tools, homes, fanciest clothing and most enviable accessories on the new group’s paragons. Meanwhile pre-human impulses would have tossed group deviants to the periphery. As a consequence, the children of each Pleistocene group’s “beautiful people” would have been healthier, better looking, more popular, and destined for greater adult success (this is true even of the offspring of high ranking apes and monkeys. By contrast, the fewer youngsters birthed by oddball parents would have been bullied, shunned and occasionally killed (also true among our primate cousins).

Let’s hop back to modern times to get an idea of the probable result. The Yanomamo prize fierce killers. Men who slaughter the largest tally of humans from competing tribes are rewarded with the greatest number of wives and father far more children than any other villagers. Timid Yanomamo men or those who loathe bloodshed have very few kids at all. Experience with laboratory animals and domesticated standbys like pit bulls show that aggression is a highly cultivatable trait. So it wouldn’t be surprising if the Yanomamo’s selective breeding produced a violent disposition which exceeds even the fairly high human norm.

Among some eskimo, on the other hand, aggression is frowned on. Men who can’t hold their temper are given the cold shoulder. As outcasts, they have a hard time finding a mate. And when it comes time for the traditional method of demonstrating friendship, swapping wives, these wrathful types are sidelined. Just as the Yanomamo breed aggression in, the eskimo breed it out. One result, the Yanomamo are constantly at war. Eskimo experience a very different fate: they are blessed with relative peace (though war is such a human universal that even Eskimo, until recently, periodically indulged in the grisly sport. Anthropologists have noted how a splinter culture’s choice of sexual fixations makes some groups tall, some short, and even alters breast and penis shape. These principles were certainly at work long before the arrival of glacial sheets and sabertooths. So language, culture and differing tools would have done for humans what simpler forms of evolution accomplished for Lake Nyas’ cichlid fish – generated an outburst of diversity.

The quibbling, rivalry and rebellion sparked by the narcissism of minor difference two million years ago eventually energized men and women whose ancestry was in a warm and pleasant clime to conquer the ice floes of the Arctic, the frigid plains of Siberia, the malarial wetlands of Southern China, and the bewilderingly varied environments of today’s France, Spain, and Germany. Fissioning groups devised ingenious ways to haul abundance from the grasp of unknown lands and seas. A swarm of new diversity generators radically accelerated these innovations during the age of symbols. Trade made many by-products of these adaptations common human property. Since then the result - cultural evolution – has leaped to dizzying speeds, throwing a spume of ever-increasing options into the communal brain.

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

This morning we feature part nine of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together, 6) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind, 7) Tools of Perception and the Construction of Reality, Reality is a Shared Hallucination. Reposted from Telepolis.

The Conformity Police

Howard Bloom

Why call the first principle of a complex adaptive system “the conformity enforcer,” objected a well-meaning colleague. “Doesn’t the notion smack of a police state?” Yes. The conformity enforcers pressing perception, behavior and appearance into a common mold can be far more brutal than we might like to think. And they begin their work at a disturbingly early age.

Jesus Christ, William Wordsworth, and the current New Age Touch The Future Movement in California have portrayed children as avatars of innocence. If so, then innocence is barb-wired with ferocity. In the early 1960s, Eibl-Eibesfeldt found “toddlers…hitting, kicking, biting and spitting at one another” no matter what culture he studied. It is unlikely that these newcomers to our world had learned their harshness from parents or from violent movies on tv. In many of the societies Eibl-Eibesfeldt scrutinized, television was at best a distant dream. In others parents worked like hell to stop the hailstorms of savagery. If anything the behavioral circuitry of sadism seems a curse genetically pre-stamped into us.

The offspring of humans are not alone at inflicting cruelty. A monkey island in Florida was surrounded by friendly alligators. Yes, I know it sounds hard to believe, but according to pioneering primatologist Harry Harlow, these ominous reptiles actually seemed to enjoy their mammalian company. The monkey youngsters, however, would wait for one of the gregarious creatures to drift by, grab it by all four legs, flatten it against a cement wall, and proceed to chew on it. To the primate hooligans, this seemed highly entertaining sport. Harlow implies that the alligators were somewhat less amused. Gangs of young monkeys will sneak up on a cage in which a mother is kept, pretend to be perfectly innocent until they get within arm’s reach, then, when the matriarch’s not looking, yank out tufts of her fur. Clusters of baby monkeys allowed to roam free in the lab form gangs that make raids for revenge or simply for kicks. Says Harlow, “If they had not learned to cooperatively aggress, there would be no monkeys in the world….” In other words, Harlow felt that collective sadism was practice for the inter-group tournaments which pit monkeys against those who would like to dine on them or rival groups of their own species determined to do them harm.

But coordinated viciousness serves a function within the group as well. It builds the backbone of a social structure, polices it, and then compels conformity. When Clifford, a juvenile baboon on the savannas of Kekopey in Kenya, injured his leg, he became a target. His agemates ganged up on him until his mother put a stop to it. But her help only halted the harassment for a short time. Adults disabled by injury undergo the same fate. One male whose leg became damaged found that adults and infants both fled screaming from him, and that the males who had been his buddies now targeted him for attack. Detestation of deformity is not limited to primates. A dominant lizard who has his tail snapped off by a predator will return to the troop over which he reigns only to find that he’s now an outcast. The sight of a herring gull in distress often inspires others of her kind not to help, but to attack. Says legendary ethologist Niko Tinbergen, hostility in social creatures is almost universal against “individuals that behave in an abnormal manner.”

Shunning the Misshappen or Ill-Fated

Human and ape societies cluster around the “fearless” and the “brave.” Mountain gorillas respect aggression, and treat those who are gentle poorly. One young female in the Virunga mountains of Central Africa was deeply attached to her brothers and father. She’d sit by her father for hours staring adoringly into his face. Then she became ill. How did the relatives she’d doted on show their concern? They pounded and picked on her.

The tendency to shun the misshapen or ill-fated is not just some dismal quirk of the animal world. An American child whose mother had been killed in a car crash reported that after the accident, the other kids in school shunned her. Even her best friend, who comforted her, had to force herself to get near her. In the late 80s, a student at a university in China made the mistake of telling her classmates that her mother had died when she was young from that point on, they made fun of her mercilessly.

Byzantine emperors knew the power of disfigurement. They cut off the noses of relatives who might have a legitimate claim to the throne, knowing the handicap would keep the nasal amputees from ever commanding respect. The trick didn’t always work. One emperor was deposed, had his nose removed, and was exiled. He snuck back in through the plumbing system with his followers, retook the city, and remounted the throne. But this was a case of will and past dominance overcoming the pull of instinct which normally would have rendered him too repulsive for words.

Psychologist and zoologist David Barash feels that our intolerance of the handicapped comes in part from an ancient impulse to distance ourselves from those who may be carrying one of the primary killers of pre-modern men and animals – infectious disease. There may be merit to his argument. But I suspect the urge to impose physical uniformity springs from the complex adaptive system’s utility sorters and resource shifters. Remember a learning machine’s most basic rule – strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail. The monkey with a broken limb botched an attempt to maneuver across a tricky landscape. The lizard with the missing tail was insufficiently wiley to avoid the teeth of an enemy. The strategy or physiology of the wailing gull went seriously awry. And the noseless member of the Byzantine royal family wore the sign of political failure on his face.

Our intolerance of deviations from a physical norm seems bundled into us at birth. Human studies from all over the world show that infants as young as two months old already prefer attractive to unattractive faces. Ironically, the most attractive faces scientists have been able to construct are composites of as many as 32 photos, their features cleverly blended into a realistic-looking approximation of a social midpoint. Adult studies demonstrate that we fawn over those who we deem beautiful, clustering around them, over-rating their intelligence, anxious to be their friends. Like moths to a flame, we are attracted to the living embodiment of typicality.

Perceptual Calibration and Punishment of Those, Who are not in line

More important to the operations of collective intelligence is an equally powerful enforcer which prods us into acting, seeing, and believing only what’s acceptable to the herd. You might call the result “perceptual calibration” – aligning members so they can operate with mass efficiency. In the first year of human life, we’ve already examined the flowerings of the herd instinct – from empathy to a fixation on a mother’s face and the following of another’s gaze. During the second year children fixate on the standards their parents lay down, comparing the objects around them to a social standard, and becoming distressed when things deviate from this shared ideal. Though fourteen-month-olds are not yet bothered by breaches of propriety, nineteen-month-olds point an accusing finger at the tiniest flaw: a hole in clothes, a chip in the paint on a toy, a spot of dirt on a wall, or, most important, the “bad” behavior of someone else. By 20 months, babies have a rich vocabulary for denigrating the deviant – they are incensed when things are “yukky,” “broken,” “boo boo” and “dirty.” In short, at less than two years old toddlers already show not just the instincts that patrol conformity within themselves, but the weapons which will help them impose it on others.

Protests against imperfection are not just some anal-compulsive trait of middle class babies in the West. They also show up in children on the Fiji islands and newly arrived immigrant babies from Viet Nam. In 1896, James Sully summed up such phenomena by observing that a child has an “inbred respect for what is customary, and…has an innate disposition to follow precedent and rule….” Modern psychologist Jerome Kagan wonders what evolutionary advantage this innate tendency to “morality” may have. The answer: it is one of those instincts which make cohesion possible, giving man his most important tool, society.

Children are supersensitive to getting out of line. The punishments their playmates hand out are often appalling. Five to ten percent of children have no friends. In one American classroom, a petition was passed around “saying sign if you hate Graham.” The teacher intercepted it just before it was handed to Graham himself. Then there are the beatings, banishments, taunts, theft of clothes and books, and other torments inflicted by gangs of children from the age of four or five on those who don’t fit in.

Unattractive children or children with strange religious backgrounds, funny names, and unusual ethnic roots are particular targets for these torments. Kids punish those who do far better than average in school and those who do far worse. One third grader was cursed with talent – she was outstanding at piano, ballet, and reading. Her classmates hated her. She tried to be pleasant to everyone, but was labelled a snob and treated with the derision she “deserved.”

In Japan, where the ideal of harmony is king, enforcement of conformity takes on particular viciousness. Ijime, bullying or picking on someone who sticks out is often led by, of all people, the teacher.

Ritch Savin Williams studied U.S. summer campers and discovered adolescent leaders were particularly gifted at dishing out ridicule. Female camp trend-setters – praised by feminist scholars of the post-Carol Gilligan school for the warmth of their gentle cooperation – were particularly wicked conformity enforcers. They did it with the carrot and the stick. A dominant female camper would offer to fix another girl’s hair or help her with her choice of clothes … both quiet ways of shaping her appearance to fit the mold. But the verbal abuse these teen leaders could mete out was so devastating that it agonized even the researchers watching it. When the girls were quizzed about dominance, they claimed to dislike it, though clearly some of them dominated others in no uncertain terms. Tellingly, they abhorred the term because to them it represented standing out and being different.

Youngsters who lead attacks on the odd often end up running animal troops or human nations. The pubescent Oliver Cromwell roamed the streets of his British hometown clubbing adults he didn’t care for with an outsized walking stick, then led the English Revolution of 1648 and ended up as a piously Puritan dictator. As a child, Fidel Castro was a bully and proud of it. In his fifties and sixties, he still enjoyed telling how he once had beat up another grammar school student because that student was the teacher’s pet. In an attempt to stop the battering, the Catholic teacher/priest whomped Castro on the head. The youth turned and pummeled the pedagogue for all he was worth. Fidel gloated that the incident had made him a school hero. Bullies act as conformity enforcers when they are children, and may become conformity enforcers in adulthood once again. Fidel, for example, allows no straying from the norms he sets for Cuban citizens. Nor did Oliver Cromwell, who persuaded the author of a famous work on freedom of the press, John Milton (the essay in question was Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica), to become his censor, and a rigorous one at that.

The tendency of children and adolescents to whip diverse humans into line grows more polished among adults. Max Weber, describing the America of the ’20s, said that to be among the fashionable elite you had to live on the correct street, wear the correct fashions, gush over the correct art, and behave in the correct manner. Otherwise, you would not get invited out. No one would show up to visit you. The threat of social exclusion drove the U.S. upper class to conformity with the norm. In pre-Revolutionary China “public standards were enforced mainly by gossip, threat of ‘loss of face,’ (prestige), and ostracism,” say anthropologists Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle.

The Utku eskimo also used social exclusion to enforce conformity. They disallowed angry thoughts, which they were sure could kill. Living on the edge of existence, closeness and cooperation were vital. Anger was regarded as a child’s emotion that adults learned to hold back. Those who failed to control their anger were teased, ignored or tossed out of the band.

Things are not that different in the modern scientific community. Sociological researchers maintain a mask of objectivity. But behind that mask some schools of thought hide ideological goals. When students in these movements report facts that contradict the tenets of the creed they are not praised for the objectivity of their work, but punished for their heresy. They are derided, their papers are rejected by journals, and they are excluded from key symposia – all an indirect way of forcing them “to leave the movement.” A similar mechanism of repression is at work in every scientific discipline I know. Mathematician Peter Nyikos reports a typical case, that of:

“Clifford Grobstein, an amphibian embryologist who has published many false claims about human embryos, yet has enormous influence. He has been cited in legal battles over the custody of human embryos, and his bogus embryology has swayed the courts despite the counter-arguments by experts in human embryology. …Grobstein wields great power in the matter of grant funding, so when biologist-philosopher Dianne Irving corrected five factual errors at a conference after a talk by Grobstein, lots of people voiced agreement in private but told her that they wouldn’t dare say such things in public themselves.”

For numerous scientists, to go against the tide risks academic suicide.

1980s New Conservatives, like the members of other groups, furtively disciplined their members to toe the party line. Paul Weaver was a dedicated neo-conservative free marketeer who believed passionately in the reigning dogma of his group – that corporations are the salvation of America. After two years at the Ford Motor Company, he became convinced that the corporation could be a self-destructive beast. When Weaver returned to New York with his new observations, his neo-conservative friends spurned him. His criticism of the corporation was an affront to the faith.

Even humor is a conformity enforcer clothed in the garb of congeniality. It focuses on others’ weaknesses, disasters, stupidities, and abnormalities. Darwin reports that in the mid-19th century, Australian aborigines would “mimic the peculiarities of some absent member of the tribe” and break into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Even in “gentle” Tibet before the Chinese takeover Heinrich Harrer, the only westerner allowed to stay at length in the capital of Lhasa, reported “If anyone stumbles or slips, they enjoy themselves for hours. …They make a mock of everything and everybody. As they have no newspapers, they indulge their criticism of untoward events or objectionable persons by means of songs and satire. Boys and girls walk through the Parcor in the evening singing the latest verses. Even the highest personages must put up with being pulled to pieces.”

Acceptance is as important to social animals as oxygen and food

Thomas Hobbes declared that the man who laughs too much is aware of how many flaws he has and maintains a high opinion of himself by focusing on the imperfections of others. And mid-20th century cartoonist Al Capp observed bitterly that “All comedy is based on man’s delight in man’s inhumanity to man.”

But perhaps the word “inhumanity” is a tad too homocentric. Humor is governed by the animal brain – the thalamus and hypothalamus. Gorillas, like humans, use mockery to punish those who botch their attempts at conformity. Two groups ran across each other in the forest. The males strutted and swaggered to show their power. One was young and inexperienced. He charged to show off his boldness, but pulled off the maneuver sloppily. An older rival made his displays with confidence and finesse. The youngsters of the inexperienced male’s group followed behind him, “exaggeratedly mocking his awkward displays of bravado.”

But often rejection is far less benevolent. Like juvenile chimpanzees, we avoid the deformed and different. In studies where an actor collapsed dramatically in the middle of a subway car, he was much less likely to get help if he had a large birth mark. A questionnaire administered by a psychologist in 1894 showed that tiny breaches of custom – men who wore earrings, people who wore a ring on their thumb or too much stylish jewelry people who tried to stand out or who strayed from the pack – roused infuriation. An experimental group was given the task of assigning others to jobs that would either pay money or involve receiving an electrical shock. They awarded the paying job to those whose personalities matched the majority, and shuffled the painful shocks to those who didn’t quite fit in.

A willingness to dish out pain is not limited to the lab. If an American worker in the 1960s and 1970s worked faster than the rest of his group, the other laborers would “bing” him – snapping their fingers painfully on his arm.

A tremendous number of cultures believe in witchcraft or the evil eye. There failure to fit in can be lethal. To the Bantu, all evil is caused by a witch, an innocent soul in whom a demonic spirit has taken up residence without his knowledge. To detect the bearer of malevolence the Bantu gather in a circle, chanting softly, as the witch doctor goes from man to man, sniffing each. The tribesmen believe that the volume of their chanting is under the control of supernatural forces. The individual in front of whom the witch doctor is testing the air when the chanting becomes the loudest is the one he picks as the demonic vessel. The unwitting conduit of evil is hauled off and dispatched from this planet by having a stake driven up his rectum. His Kraal is burned, his family wiped out, his cattle given to the chief, and a smattering of cows and bulls are divvied out to the witch doctor as a tip. But in reality the chanting is a popularity contest. And as in the American witch-hunts of the 1600s, suspicion locks in on the person who strays the furthest from the norm.

In this we differ little from our animal cousins. Social exclusion among chimps involves a puzzling willingness to dish out pain. At Holland’s Arnhem zoo one male chimp was attacked by two others so viciously that they removed his testicles, slashed his head, back, sides and anus, removed several of his toes and wounded his hands. Yet the next morning he did not want to be separated from his attackers – the key males in the social group in which he’d spent most of his life.Twelve hours later, his wounds had killed him.

But which really does the killing – the physical injury or the social disapproval? When vervet monkeys are attacked by their peers, the bites they get are often trivial – in fact, many don’t break the skin. But the punished monkey can go into shock and die.

Human children are wounded far more than physically when lashed by humiliation from those who deem them different. Adults assume that youngsters are concerned with problems like the birth of a brother, the prospect of an operation or a trip to the dentist. But a 1988 survey of 1,814 children by the University of Colorado’s Kaoreu Yamamoto showed that, in fact, many of the primary fears of nine to fourteen-year-old children in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Egypt, Japan and the Philippines focussed on being shamed or disgraced in front of friends.Yes, children were frightened of the expected horrors: a mother or a father’s death, going blind, and seeing their parents fight. But their preoccupations also included being held back a grade in school and wetting their pants in the classroom.

Yamamoto’s study indicated that even the experts were usually way off base in estimating the importance of these fears. Ann Epstein of Harvard Medical School pointed out the most chilling fact of all: that humiliation was one of the most common causes of childhood and teen suicide. Acceptance is as important to social animals as oxygen and food. When we reach the complex adaptive system’s utility sorters, we’ll see exactly why.

Humans have been willing to starve rather than give up their social ties. The Japanese have incorporated this inherently human fact into their culture far more overtly than we have. Most Westerners are familiar with one of Japan’s most popular adages – “The nail that stands out will be hammered down.” The pre-eminent expert on Japanese culture, Edwin Reischauer explained twenty years ago that the Japanese were painfully concerned about what others might think of them. The ultimate threat parents delivered to a misbehaving youngster: “people will laugh at you.” The effect, said Reischauer, was “devastating.”

The supreme punishment in a Japanese village, said Reischauer, was ostracism. The inability to trade food and other necessities with your neighbors could seriously threaten your existence on this earth. Something remarkably similar once played a primary role in keeping early North American colonists in line. During the 16th and 17th century, behavior was policed by taking advantage of the individual’s entrapment in a small community. The entire village would participate in the ritual of his marriage. However it would also unite in chastising his aberrance. Puritan settlers were dependent for their meals and feelings of self worth on the two to three hundred neighbors with whom they shared their labors in the isolation of a dangerous wilderness. As in Japan, exclusion from the community could increase your chance of death dramatically.

By the 19th century, on the other hand, land in the Northeast had been cleared of Indians and wild animals. One could easily leave one town and move to another, or better yet, blend into the crowds of a large city. New circumstances called for new conformity enforcers – highly portable ones. On the positive side were passionate emotions like love, which substituted for the pressure of neighbors, parents and propinquity to draw one into marriage. On the negative side was your sense of guilt. Your parents didn’t humiliate you in public, they sent you to your room so your conscience would torment you. The government put you in a penitentiary, where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you mercilessly. But the publicly inflicted shame of village life and the more private “conscience” you carried in the anonymous metropolis both – at heart – came down to the same bottom line: they meant that the people who mattered to you the most were going to reject you, sometimes ferociously. The agony of anticipated shame usually whips the non-conformist tendencies out of us, and lashes us into running with the herd.

The instinctual exercise of cruelty thrusts non-conforming individuals to the periphery and sometimes expels them entirely, squeezing us into social units as automatically as the discomfort of termites at the sight of scattered feces compels them to turn excreta into architecture. The termites’ mounds of excrement eventually mesh to form cities of up to 20 million inhabitants. Our packs of vicious children and adults gradually shape the social complexes we know as religions, sciences, corporations and nations. The tools of our cohesion include ridicule, isolation, assault, torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose. A collective brain may sound warm and fuzzily New Age, but some of the forces twisting it together are far less kindly than we’d like to think. ??

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

This morning we feature part eight of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together, 6) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind, 7) Tools of Perception and the Construction of Reality. Reposted from Telepolis.

Reality is a Shared Hallucination

Howard Bloom

The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain’s “psyche” were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach’s grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag – pure individual perception does not exist.

Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see, the thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception.

Don DeLillo

A central rule of large-scale organization goes like this: the greater the spryness of a massive enterprise, the more internal communication it takes to support the teamwork of the parts. For example, in all but the simplest plants and animals only 5% of DNA is dedicated to DNA’s “real job,” manufacturing proteins. The remaining 95% is preoccupied with organization and administration, supervising the maintenance of bodily procedures, or even merely interpreting the corporate rule book “printed” in a string of genes.

In an effective learning machine, the connections between internal elements far outnumber windows to the outside world. Take the cerebral cortex, roughly 80% of whose nerves connect with each other, not with sensory input from the eyes or ears. No wonder in human society individuals spend most of their time communicating with each other, not exploring beasts and plants which could make an untraditional dish. This cabling for “bureaucratic maintenance” has a far greater impact on what we “see” and “hear” than most psychological researchers suspect. For it puts us in the hands of a conformity enforcer whose power and subtlety are almost beyond belief.

In our previous episode we mentioned that the brain’s emotional center – the limbic system – decides which swatches of experience to “notice” and store in memory. Memory is the core of what we call reality. Think about it for a second. What do you actually hear and see right now? This article. The walls and furnishings of the room in which you sit. Perhaps some music or some background noise. Yet you know sure as you were born that there’s a broader world outside those walls. You are certain that your home, if you are away from it, is still there. You can sense each room, remember where most of your things are placed. You know the building where you work – its colors, layout, and the feel of it. Then there are the companions who enrich your life – family, the folks at the office, neighbors, friends, and even people you are fond of whom you haven’t talked to in a year or more – few of whom, if any, are in the room with you. You also know we sit on a planet called the earth, circling an incandescent ball of sun, buried in one of many galaxies. At this instant, reading by yourself, where do these realities reside? Inside your mind. Memory in a very real sense is reality. What the limbic system decides to “see” and store away becomes an interior universe pretending to stretch so far outside that it can brush the edges of infinity.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

Guy de Maupassant

The limbic system is more than an emotive sifter of the relevant from the inconsequent. It is an intense monitor of others, using its social fixations to retool your perceptions and your memories. In short, the limbic system makes each of us a plug-in of the crowd.

Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world’s premier memory researchers, is among the few who know how powerfully the group shapes what we think we know. In the late 1970s, Loftus performed a series of key experiments. In a typical example, she showed college students a moving picture of a traffic accident, then asked after the film, “How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road.” Several days later when witnesses to the film were quizzed about what they’d seen, 17% were sure they’d spied a barn, though there weren’t any buildings in the film at all. In a related experiment subjects were shown a collision between a bicycle and an auto driven by a brunette, then afterwards heard questions about the “blond” at the steering wheel. Not only did they remember the non-existent blond vividly, but when they were shown the sequence a second time, they had a hard time believing that it was the same incident they now recalled so graphically. One subject said, “It’s really strange because I still have the blond girl’s face in my mind and it doesn’t correspond to her [pointing to the woman on the videotape]…It was really weird.” In visual memory, Loftus concluded that hints leaked to us by fellow humans are more important than the scene whose details actually reach our eyes.

Though it got little public attention until the debates about “recovered” memories of sexual abuse in the early and mid 1990s, this avenue of research had begun at least two generations ago. It was 1956 when Solomon Asch published a classic series of experiments in which he and his colleagues showed cards with lines of different lengths to clusters of their students. Two lines were exactly the same size and two were clearly not – the mavericks stuck out like basketball players at a convention for the vertically handicapped. During a typical experimental run, the researchers asked nine volunteers to claim that two badly mismatched lines were actually the same, and that the actual twin was a total misfit. Now came the nefarious part. The researchers ushered a naive student into the room with the collaborators and gave him the impression that the crowd already there knew just as little as he did about what was going on. Then a white-coated psychologist passed the cards around. One by one he asked the pre-drilled shills to announce out loud which lines were alike. Each dutifully declared that two terribly unlike lines were perfect twins. By the time the scientist prodded the unsuspecting newcomer to pronounce judgement, he usually went along with the bogus acclamation of the crowd. Asch ran the experiment over and over again. When he quizzed his victims of peer pressure, it turned out that many had done far more than simply go along to get along. They had actually shaped their perceptions to agree, not with the reality in front of them, but with the consensus of the multitude.

To polish off the mass delusion, many of those whose perception had NOT been skewed became collaborators in the praise of the emperor’s new clothes. Some did it out of self-doubt. They were convinced that the facts their eyes reported were wrong, the herd was right, and that an optical illusion had tricked them into seeing things. Still others realized with total clarity which lines were duplicates, but lacked the nerve to utter an unpopular opinion. Conformity enforcers had rearranged everything from visual processing to open speech, and had revealed a mechanism which can wrap and seal a crowd into a false belief.

Another experiment indicates just how deeply social suggestion can penetrate the neural mesh through which we think we see hard-and-solid facts. Students with normal color vision were shown blue slides. But one stooge in the room declared the slides were green. Only 32% of the students ended up going along with the vocal but misguided proponent of green vision. Later, however, the subjects were taken aside, shown blue-green slides and asked to rate them for blueness or greenness. Even the students who had refused to see green where there was none in the original experiment showed that the insistent greenies in the room had colored their perceptions. They rated the new slides more green than they would have otherwise. More to the point, when asked to describe the color of the afterimage they saw, the subjects often reported it was red-purple – the hue of an afterimage left by the color green. The words of one determined speaker had penetrated the most intimate sanctums of the eye and brain.

But this is just the iceberg’s tip. Social experience literally shapes cerebral morphology. It guides the wiring of the brain through the most intensely formative years of human life, determining, among other things, which of the thinking organ’s sections will be enlarged, and which will shrink.

An infant’s brain is sculpted by the culture into which the child is born. Six-month olds can distinguish or produce every sound in virtually every human language. But within a mere four months, nearly two thirds of this capacity has been sliced away. The slashing of ability is accompanied by ruthless alterations in cerebral tissue. Brain cells are measured against the requirements of the physical and interpersonal environment. The 50% of neurons found useful thrive. The 50% which remain unexercised are literally forced to die. Thus the floor plan underlying the mind is crafted on-site to fit an existing framework of community.

When barely out of the womb, babies are already riveted on a major source of social cues. Newborns to four-month-olds would rather look at faces than at almost anything else. Rensselaer Polytechnic’s Linnda Caporael points out what she calls “micro-coordination”, in which a baby imitates its mother’s facial expression, and the mother, in turn, imitates the baby’s. Since psychologist Paul Ekman, as we’ll see later in more detail, has demonstrated that the faces we make recast our moods, the baby is learning how to yoke its emotions to those of a social team. Emotions, as we’ve already seen, craft our vision of reality. There are other signs that babies synchronize their feelings to those of others around them at an astonishingly early age. Empathy – one of those things which bind us together intimately – comes to us early. Children less than a year old who see another child hurt show all the signs of undergoing the same pain.

After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin’ but a collective hunch.

Lily Tomlin

Cramming themselves further into a common perceptual mold, animal and human infants entrain themselves to see what others see. A four-month old human will swivel to look at an object his parent is staring at. A baby chimp will do the same. By their first birthday, infants have extended their input-gathering to their peers. When they notice that another child’s eyes have fixated on an object, they swivel around to focus on that thing themselves. If they don’t see what’s so interesting, they look back to check the direction of the other child’s gaze and make sure they’ve got it right. When one of the babies points to an item that has caught her fancy, other children look to see just what it is.

One year olds show other ways in which they soak up social pressure. Put a cup and something unfamiliar in front of them and their natural tendency will be to check out the novel object. But repeat the word “cup” and the infant will dutifully rivet its gaze on the drinking vessel. Children go along with the herd even in their tastes in food. when researchers put two-to-five-year olds at a table for several days with other kids who loved the edibles they loathed, the children with the dislike did a 180 degree turn and became zestful eaters of the item they’d formerly disdained. The preference was still going strong weeks after the peer pressure had stopped.

At six, children are obsessed with being accepted by the group and become incredibly sensitive to violations of group norms. They’ve been gripped by yet another conformity enforcer which structures their perceptions to coincide with those around them.

Even rhythm draws humans together in the subtlest of ways. William Condon of Pennsylvania’s Western State Psychiatric Institute analyzed films of adult conversations and noticed a peculiar process at work. Unconsciously, the conversationalists began to coordinate their finger movements, eye blinks and nods. Electroencephalography showed something even more astonishing – their brain waves were moving together. Newborn babies already show this synchrony – in fact, an American infant still fresh from the womb will just as happily match its body movements to the speech of someone speaking Chinese as to someone speaking English. As time proceeds, these unnoticed synchronies draw larger and larger groups together. A student working under the direction of anthropologist Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm. One little girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Hall and his student realized that without knowing it, she was “the director” and “the orchestrator.” Eventually, the researchers found a tune that fit the silent cadence. When they played it and rolled the film, it looked exactly as if each kid were dancing to the melody. But there had been no music playing in the schoolyard. Said Hall, “Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves.” William Condon was led to conclude that it doesn’t make sense to view humans as “isolated entities.” And Edward Hall took this inference a step further: “an unconscious undercurrent of synchronized movement tied the group together” into what he called a “shared organizational form.”

No wonder input from the herd so strongly colors the ways in which we see our world. Students at MIT were given a bio of a guest lecturer. One group’s background sheet described the speaker as cold, the other group’s handout praised him for his warmth. Both groups sat together as they watched the lecturer give his presentation. But those who’d read the bio saying he was cold treated him as distant and aloof. Those who’d been tipped off that he was warm, rated him as friendly and approachable. In judging a fellow human being, students replaced external fact with input they’d been given socially.

The cues rerouting herd perception come in many forms. Sociologists Janet Lynne Enke and Donna Eder discovered that in gossip, one person opens with a negative comment on someone outside the group. How the rest of the gang goes on the issue depends entirely on the second opinion expressed. If the second prattler agrees that the outsider is disgusting, virtually everyone will chime in with a sound-alike opinion. If, on the other hand, the second commentator objects that the outsider has positive qualities, the group is far less likely to descend like a flock of harpies tearing the stranger’s reputation limb from limb.

Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. The strangest come from choruses of the dead – cultural predecessors whose legacy has a dramatic effect on our vision of reality. Take the impact of gender stereotypes – notions developed over hundreds of generations, contributed to, embellished and passed on by literally billions of people during the long human march through time. In one study, parents were asked to give their impression of their brand new babies. Infant boys and girls are completely indistinguishable aside from the buds of reproductive equipment between their legs. Their size, texture, and the way in which newborns of opposite sex act are the same. Yet parents consistently described girls as softer, smaller and less attentive than boys. The crowds within us resculpt our gender verdicts over and over again. Two groups of experimental subjects were asked to grade the same paper. One was told the author was John McKay. The other was told the paper’s writer was Joan McKay. Even female students evaluating the paper gave it higher marks if they thought was from a male.

The ultimate repository of herd influence is language – a device that not only condenses the influence of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on. Every word we use carries within it the experience of generation after generation of men, families, tribes, and nations, including their insights, value judgements, ignorance, and spiritual beliefs.

Experiments show that people from all cultures can see subtle differences between colors placed next to each other. But only those societies equipped with names for numerous shades can spot the difference when the two swatches of color are apart. At the turn of the century, The Chukchee had very few terms for visual hues. If you asked them to sort colored yarns, they did a poor job of it. But they had over 24 terms for patterns of reindeer hide, and could classify reindeer far better than the average European scientist, whose vocabulary didn’t supply him with appropriate tools.

Physiologist/ornithologist Jared Diamond, in New Guinea, saw to his dismay that despite all his university studies of nature, the natives were far better at distinguishing bird species than he was. Diamond had a set of scientific criteria taught in the zoology classes back home. The natives possessed something better: names for each animal variety, and a set of associations describing characteristics Diamond had never been taught to differentiate – everything from a bird’s peculiarities of deportment to its taste when grilled over a flame. Diamond had binoculars and state-of-the-art taxonomy. But the New Guineans laughed at his incompetence. They were equipped with a vocabulary each word of which compacted the experience of armies of bird-hunting ancestors.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Linnda Caporael points out that even when we see someone perform an action in an unusual way, we rapidly forget the unaccustomed subtleties and reshape our recalled vision so that it corresponds to the patterns dictated by language-borne conventionality. A perfect example comes from 19th century America, where sibling rivalry was present in fact, but according to theory didn’t exist. The experts were blind to its presence, as shown by its utter absence from family manuals. In the expert and popular view, all that existed between brothers and sisters was love. But letters from middle class girls exposed unacknowledged cattiness and jealousy.

Sibling rivalry didn’t begin to creep from the darkness of perceptual invisibility until 1893, when future Columbia University professor of political and social ethics Felix Adler hinted at the nameless notion in his manual for the Moral Instruction of Children. During the 1920s, the concept of jealousy between boys and girls finally shouldered its way robustly into the repertoire of conscious concepts, appearing in two widely quoted government publications and becoming the focus of a 1926 Child Study Association of America crusade. It was only at this point that experts finally coined the term “sibling rivalry.” The formerly non-existent demon was blamed for adult misery, failing marriages, crime, homosexuality, and God knows what all else. By the 1940s, nearly every child-raising guide had extensive sections on this ex-nonentity. Parents writing to major magazines spotted the previously unseeable emotion almost everywhere.

The stored experience language carries can tweak the difference between life and death. It’s been reported that one unnamed tribe used to lose starving mothers, fathers and children by the droves each time famine struck, despite the fact that a river flowed near them filled with fish. The problem: they didn’t define fish as food. We could easily suffer the same fate if stranded in their wilderness, simply because our culture tells us that a rich source of nutrients is inedible too – insects.

The influence of the mob of those who’ve gone before and those who stand around us now can be mind-boggling. During the middle ages when universities first arose, a local barber/surgeon was called into the lecture chamber year after year to dissect a corpse for medical students gathered from the width and breadth of Europe. A scholar on a raised platform discoursed about the revelations unfolding before the students’ eyes. The learned doctor would invariably describe a network of cranial blood vessels that were nowhere to be found. He’d report a shape for the liver radically different from the form of the organ sliding around on the surgeon’s blood-stained hands. He’d verbally portray jaw joints which had no relation to those being displayed on the trestle below him. But he never changed his narrative to fit the actualities. Nor did the students or the surgeon ever stop to correct the book-steeped authority. Why? The scholar was reciting the “facts” as found in volumes over 1,000 years old – the works of the Roman master Galen, founder of “modern” medicine.

Alas, Galen had drawn his conclusions, not from dissecting humans, but from probing the bodies of pigs and monkeys. Pigs and monkeys do have the strange features Galen described. Humans, however, do not. But that didn’t stop the medieval professors from seeing what wasn’t there. For no more were they ruggedly individualistic observers than are you and I. Their sensory pathways echoed with voices gathered for a millennium, the murmurings of a mob composed of both the living and the dead. The world experts of those days and ours conjured up assemblies of mirage. Like ours, their perceptual faculties were unrecognized extensions of a collective brain.   

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

This morning we feature part seven of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together, 6) Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind. Reposted from Telepolis.

Perception and Reality

Howard Bloom

Between 65 million years ago and the present, collective intelligence tentatively stretched toward globality once again. The bird species salaciously called tits showed up on the scene roughly ten million years ago. Airborne, they were high-speed spreaders of behavioral memes. It is difficult to tell what kinds of tricks these creatures passed to one another in prehistoric times. 

Some idea about the tricks comes from an incident famous among animal behaviorists. During the late 1940s, London’s milk vendors replaced cardboard bottle caps with aluminum foil. A few blue titmice figured out how to pierce the flimsy metal so they could sip the liquid’s crown of unhomogenized cream. So rapidly did this innovation spread that seemingly overnight dairy robbery was fattening the bellies of titmice the length and breadth of the British Isles. Conformity enforcers had spread a potent meme.

The diversity generator of competition between feathered flocks launched new variations on antique ploys. To get a notion of how this must have worked, it’s useful to eyeball another modern example. The oystercatcher, whose ancestors evolved roughly 50 million years ago, lived on seacoasts and used a flat, knifelike bill to dig worms and shellfish out of sand. Evidence suggests that during the last five hundred years some Scottish and British oystercatcher flocks were crowded out of easy pickings on the beach and forced to look for feeding grounds in savagely unfamiliar terrain. They moved upriver – an unheard of step for birds adapted to the edges of the sea. Eventually, the homeless wanderers discovered a paradise not presaged by instinctual memory: irrigated farm lands and riverine wetlands perfect for the excavation techniques built into their genes. Like bacterial “random walkers,” they’d opened a vast new resource to the species. In this way non-conformists had made their contribution to a planetary software pool.

The contagious ways of doing things called “behavioral memes” knitted separate species together. Pleistocene mammals still live side by side in the Serengeti plains of East Africa: the zebra, the wildebeest and the Thompson’s gazelle. When the dry season sucks life from their flat pastures in the southeast, these animals make a hundred mile procession north to hilly Kenyan woodlands rich in watered meadow. Zebras lead, each year improvising a new track, but always with the same destination in mind. The herd of wildebeests – a potential chaos of a million animals – is conformity enforced to follow the striped equines. Then the delicate gazelles, taking their memetic cues from the zebras and the wildebeests, are swept by imitative drives to bring up the rear. When the immense migration reaches its goal, the diversity generator of speciation fits these varied animals into a mega-partnership. The first arrivals, zebras, crop the roughest and tallest grass – food too tough for wildebeests to eat. This browsing exposes tender mid-height shoots upon which wildebeests can make their feast. By the time the gazelles appear, the turf is sufficiently low to offer their favorite dish, ground-hugging vegetation. Though memeless, the grasses join the multi-species circle dance, repaying the pruning they’ve received by sending up fresh shoots and stalks.

Chimpanzees, which became a separate species roughly six million years ago, developed flourishing cultures – inventing memes and passing them down the generational chain. The chimps of Gombe and of today’s Tai forests created sets of tools for opening palm-oil nuts. The implements of the Tai, Mahale and Gombe chimps are subtly different and used in different ways. All three groups have learned the handiness of sticks. But only the Tai have figured out that twigs and branches can be used to pull the marrow from the hollow of a bone. Mahale and Tai chimps use their fingers to nab the protein snacks we call termites and ants – stoically enduring their victims’ bites. The Gombe residents have mastered the knack of dipping sticks into the fortress entrance of a mound and harvesting bugs in painless quantity. Gombe chimps also use sticks to scratch and clean themselves. Their Tai and Mahale counterparts haven’t yet attempted this hygienic art. Even the use of stone hammer and anvil to crack nuts – dependent on techniques so intricate that they can take seven years for a young chimp to fully master – are radically different in each group. There is, however, one stark uniformity – each troop has seized the “concept” of tool use.

The strangest networkers of all first climbed to their feet roughly four million years ago. Their hands were more dexterous than those of chimps. Chimpanzees tossed stones and sticks at tigers and others who invaded with potentially evil intent. But their aim was pathetic and the distance they could clear was barely 20 feet. Proto-humans had a hurling arm and an aim sufficiently sure to bring a bird down in mid-flight. Their fingers were nimbler too. Chimps primarily use stone tools ready-made by nature. Humans took a far more active role in this technology. Chimps had already invented weaving (though birds had beaten them to it). Every night the mini-apes interlaced leafy boughs to make a sleeping nest. Humans were equipped to knit far more than this one artifact.

Roughly 2.7 million years ago, Homo habilis began to crank out tools from stones and bones. In the beginning, this was largely a matter of finding a rock which was already sharp or a cracked rib with an accidental point, techniques on a par with those of chimpanzees. Our shallow-skulled ancestors (their thinking apparatus was half the size of what we carry in our skulls today) had figured out how to use crude implements to dig and grind. The technology spread from group to group, but only reached from Ethiopia to adjoining Kenya, a distance animals like birds would have found disdainfully small. It took a million years or so before the communal intelligence of proto-humans stretched its scope. Then Homo erectus, with a 56% larger brain, came up with two new breakthroughs – tapping one stone with another so skillfully that the target rock’s lines of stress fractured, dislodging flattened slivers small and large. Later the new hominids devised a second step: creating hand axe blades by tapering each side of the rocky sheet. Now the spread began to leap. Early flaking travelled from Northern Africa to the continent’s far south. From 1.8 million years ago to roughly 500,000 years ago, it somersaulted the thousands of miles to Europe far in the northwest and China in the almost unimaginably distant east. The hominid collective mind was going global, carried by what archaeologist Clive Walker calls “timewalkers” – those of our ancestors seized by travel lust. African tool making forms (termed Oldowan) were used from England, Hungary, Germany and Israel to Peking. Separation did not create major change, nor did time. The Acheulean-style stone axe was in use from 1.5 million b.p. until a mere 4,000 years ago.

As humans spread, so did other signs of their unfolding global mind. Fire was popular in both Africa and China over 400,000 years ago. The axon of travel had spread Promethean flame across a walking distance of over 10,000 miles. The stone tool kits of that period, whether in Africa, Europe, or Asia, were very much the same. Again, the glial tissue of learning had shuttled a common pattern across a far flung neural weave. Wherever men and women went, they carried their emulative memes. So fiercely did the conformity enforcer work that it guaranteed a common shape for tools during 1.5 million years.

The environments over which men swept spurred diversity generators too. In Southeast Asia many anthropologists are convinced men learned how to fashion their hunting tools not from stone and wood, but from a plant able to take a sharp, hard point – bamboo. 100,000 years ago more regional variations cropped up. This took another 20% boost in brain size – brought by our immediate predecessor and near lookalike, Homo sapiens sapiens. In the north, men contrived ways to cope with vicious cold. Weather shifted cataclysmically, lakes of immense size appeared and disappeared, new lands opened as oceans shrank then closed again beneath returning waves, and even the Mediterranean Sea changed and rechanged utterly. All this provoked new forms of flexibility. Proto-humans echoed the ancient patterns of bacteria, which triumph over catastrophe by forging whole new ways of life.

Chimpanzees and baboons long ago learned to hunt in groups. The meat of colobus monkeys is a favorite among chimps, who cleverly deploy in squadrons to corner their elusive prey. Baboons occasionally invent team tactics to bring down a small gazelle or wild pig. But after several years, the males who bring home bacon move on and forget this social skill, only to eventually create it once again.

By 35,000 years ago, brains like our own were allowing humanity to realize exploits far beyond the animal ken. Chimps do not forget the tricks of group hunting. Nor did we. With our delicately flaked stone tools, now far more sophisticated than they’d been two million years earlier, we were able to strip the fur from our prey (woolly mammoths were popular, in those days of ice), carve out their ribs, use the calcium struts as framework for large homes, and cover the crescent-shaped bones with fur. One pelt would not suffice to tent a house of substantial size. Our ability to use one tool to fashion another, something no bird or chimp seems to have known, allowed us to extend weaving far beyond the limits to which chimps and birds had taken it, making threads from sinews and needles from bone. With these our ice age ancestors could stitch enough hides together to roof and side their skeletal supports. They could also fashion pelts into elaborate clothes, then encrust their haute couture with beadwork made from carved, drilled and polished bits of bone. Our new skills had brought us back to the elaborate decoration of early bower birds.

Why the constant echo of the same forces, even many of the same modus operandi, among men, microorganisms, birds and other beasts? It’s often said that humans differ a mere 1.6% to 3.6% in our chromosomes from chimps. But we forget that most of our genes we share with life forms from the most to the least primitive. We are all programmed by a common heritage. In later episodes I’ll suggest a theory to explain why old motifs reappear in the strangest ways. Why men, for example, are compelled to act so much like quarks and leptons hungering for companionship. This theory penetrates the cosmic tapestry to a level molecules, genes and emperors must obey. But we will have to save the unveiling of this scalpel for a later time, and first see how the pentagram of complex adaptivity works its deepest mysteries.

Language Networks

Knitting nodes of humans like synapses was long distance trade, which first reared its head two million years ago, specializing in the swap of rare and workable stone. A crucial aid in the give and take of craft and raw material was a transmitter capable of threading whole new kinds of intricacy from one mind to another. More than the wrrs and chutters of monkeys, this was a brocade of sound that gathered tufts of meaning into tapestries. Specialists call it syntactic language: noises linked in structured chains of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Some theorists propose that the germ of sentences may have appeared two million years ago. One hypothesis suggests that speech’s rise coincided with the beginning of tool making. Another says it came about as a substitute for the grooming which holds a troop of monkeys or apes together. Even the most cautious expert seems to agree that full-fledged language was in place by 30,000 years ago. Amidst the wealth of speculation, one bit of evidence stands out. Analysis of a two million year old skull from Koobi Fora in Africa indicates that Homo habilis possessed a patch of brain unknown in our previous ancestors. This new cerebral curio was Broca’s area – an apparatus vital to fluid, nuanced self expression.

For many episodes, I’ve traced a form of socially transmissible knowledge not recognized in previous memetic schemes: the behavioral meme. Human and animal bodies pick up information from pressure gauges in the bottoms of the feet, from nerves which wrap the base of fur and body hairs, from others sensing the vibrations of bristles in the ear, from the tips of neural fibers groping molecules in the nasal cavity’s air, and from light detectors in the eye. The nervous system zaps these gleanings to a jerry rig of gadgetry whose strange ways we’ll soon see. And all is funneled through the emotional center of the brain – the limbic system – a leftover from reptilian and early mammalian times. There, instinct and personal memory set off signal flares such as excitement or disgust. Should a batch of input spark a meaningful ignition, the limbic system routes the arrival to the storage lockers of the mind. But not all storage lockers are the same. In fact, there are two radically different kinds.

If the entering experience is fear, elation or a body movement – leaping from the top branch of one tree to another, riding a bicycle, hammering a recalcitrant nut into giving up its meat – it is shuffled down to the amygdala and planted deep under the eaves of the cortex in a curved mesh of axons called the striatum, with excess packed away in the motor and sensory pathways, the cerebellum, and a widespread nervous system so out of our control that its very name is “autonomic.” We’ve seen the bewildering variety of animals who can manage this imitative learning feat, catching the passed football of emotional and muscle memories. In humans implicit memes remain outside of our awareness. Yes, we know how to ride a bike. But the finest rally racer can’t explain the symphony of neural cues he uses to sustain a simple thing like balance. If we focus consciously on the angle to which we must adjust each vertebra while slaloming through traffic at top speed, we are likely to lose the hang and scrape our head on asphalt.

Broca’s area, the brain enhancement possessed two million years ago by the Homo habilis known as KNM-ER 1470, helped create entirely new forms of data cabinets, those which house explicit memes. Explicit memories, the kind we can recite and convey by speech, the kind that our story-telling consciousness can spin into detailed instructions or share with a high-paid shrink, take a very different route to permanent storage. They pass upward to the hippocampus, where they are distributed to the cortexes of the temporal lobes, accessible to manipulators like Broca’s area and to two others which emerged in early Homo habilis – the supramarginal and angular gyri. These are some of the processors which prep data for our blathering consciousness and tongue.

Language laces spectacular new properties into the group brain. Among other things, it stitches individual minds into a quilt of mass hallucination – an intricate shared vision able to carry a tribe beyond all visible horizons or to throw the clan dramatically off course. This consensual delusion – known to us as “human culture” – has become the most intriguing network-splicer of them all. But within it lies a paradox – for language and culture spawn simultaneous opposites: conformity and diversity. The wrestling of these intimate antitheses gives the group brain of humans an agility not seen since the creative global web which first arose among cyanobacteria some 3.5 billion years ago.

However, to unravel the weave and clash of culture’s phantasms, we must first expose one of the strangest ways in which conformity enforcers needle-and-thread generations and widely dispersed humans into a common drapery…the illusion of “reality.”

What is “Reality”?

This way, that way, I do not know What to do: I am of two minds.

Sappho

Back to basics for a moment. Just what is “reality?” Is it an oh-so-solid thing you can pound with your hands and rivet with your eyes? Or is it, as post-modernists proclaim, a projection of the social brain? Postmodernism is often a fashionable bungle of obfuscation, but in this case the eyes and hands don’t have it – the “radical constructionists” do. Reality is more a fabrication than even the trendiest postmodernists suspect.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, logical positivists said that knowledge broke down into two parts: “sense-data, and the conceptual structures we use to clip the sense data together.” One formalizer of the emerging philosophy, J.S.L. Gilmour, proclaimed that sense data are “objective and unalterable.” Good guess, but no cigar! Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield’s studies are often cited by those who believe reality is a concrete thing we perceive without distortion. When Penfield touched the naked brains of neurosurgery patients with electrodes in 1933, they reported vivid, detailed memories. The conclusion many drew and continue believing to this day is that the brain warehouses fine-grained tapes of past experience. Later analysis showed this conclusion was mistaken. Many of the “memories” were confabulations. One patient, for example, recalled the time that he’d been robbed down to the minutest detail. There was only one problem – he’d never been robbed in his life.

The reality of the external world registers poorly on the human mind. One eyewitness to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination swore the killer had crawled away on his hands and knees, another said he’d leaped fifteen feet, a third declared that he’d stopped to deliver a line of Latin, and a fourth said emphatically that he’d shimmied down a flagpole. There was no flagpole at the scene. Even the most highly trained observers end up mixing fiction with their “facts”. Before chromosomes were discovered, scientists looked carefully at cells then drew what they had “seen” without a chromosome in sight. After chromosomes had become accepted truths, researchers suddenly peppered their “unvarnished” cellular portraits with the things. Lacking the concept of the chromosome, observers would have sworn these objects were not there.

Other oddities spindle, fold and mutilate the seeming firmness of “the real world.” Turn the level of lighting up and down and the sound of a nearby buzz saw seems to rise and fall as well. If you shine a light and play a faint tone over and over again, then turn on the light in utter silence, the mind will hear a tone that isn’t there.

The image that we see is the end product of chopping, coding, long-distance transmission, neural guesswork and editable cut and paste. The slice and dice begins in the eye itself, which separates and reshapes input rather than merely taking snapshots. Some photo cells are specialized to register a fine edge. When they spot what they are looking for, they take enormous liberties. They “request” that the cells around them cease reporting what those cells “see” so the edge-experts can spotlight the contour which they’re working to pick out. Yes, data-juggling begins at very the frontier where our senses meet the outer world.

Next come radical forms of transmutation. Photo cells transmogrify incoming light to a pulse of chemicals and electrons. Twisting things even further, the 125 million neurons of the eye must compress their hoard of interpretations to a code able to squeeze through a cable a mere million neurons in size. On arrival in the brain, the compacted stream stops briefly in the thalamus, where it is mixed, matched and modified with flows of input from ears, muscles, fingertips, and even sensors indicating body position.

The thrice rearranged jumble of jigsaw pieces is sent off to the visual cortex, where it is divided up again. Each portion is tucked into a separate storage belt responsible for gleaning a different type of meaning. If you’re twirling in a swivel chair, one belt will reshape the blur whipped past your eyes to a picture crisp with artificial clarity. Meanwhile neurons from all over the brain sift scattered fragments, trying to contribute their own sense of them. For instance, cells which signal if an animal or human is friend or foe add their best guess to the moving batch of “sensory” ingredients.

Finally a council of representatives from the superior colliculus, the thalamus, the locus coeruleus, the hypothalamus and the occipital cortex pool their squabble of conclusions and cast a vote on what the twinges of light impinging on the retina might be. Not until they’ve agreed on an image do they send it to the left cerebral hemisphere, presenting it as a panorama accompli to the conscious mind. What we see is not the product of direct perception, but of a reconstruction which borders on fragile artistry.

The assembly process we call “sight” is so powerful that if you are given a set of goggles whose custom lenses turn everything you see upside down, eventually your sensory construction crew will take the topsy turvy rays of light and rebuild their image upside up.

The eyes are not the only “senses” which use a Rube Goldberg process to simplify the world. The entire human body is composed of separate systems bouncing signals back and forth, sometimes conflicting, sometimes reaching a disturbingly synthetic compromise. Dr. Michael Gazzaniga feels a center in the left cerebral hemisphere pulls together messages from the competing factions and fashions them into a policy statement of the moment. It also uses them, in Gazzaniga’s opinion, to construct a theory which it calls the self and another which it calls the world. But that ever-changing theory can be terribly off base.

Often we don’t have the foggiest idea of what’s going on in our most immediate reality – our selves. Researchers rigged subjects to a finger-pulse stress detector, then ran their human guinea pigs through a modestly hair-raising situation. When the ordeal ended each victim was quizzed on how he or she felt. “Fine” said many, whom the stress detector indicated were very rattled indeed. “Upset,” said others who, according to their physiological signals were actually quite calm. Further studies have shown that adolescents who report they are aggressive often aren’t, and those who say they’re not aggressive are. In one research trial, women were hooked up to a device measuring vaginal blood volume and given an erotic story to read. Many who said they were aroused weren’t, and many who said they weren’t were. In yet another experimental probe, subjects were wired to an electroencephalograph rigged to register sleep and were allowed to doze off. Though many fell into a solid slumber, they usually were certain they’d stayed wide awake.

As we shall see in our next episode, the internal assembly steps patching together our reality are filled with open loops demanding input from a crowd of other human beings. At a level far, far deeper than we know, even the most granite of our solidities is a chimera frozen in position by the conformity enforcers of the communal brain.  

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

This morning we feature part six of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme, 5) Why Birds and Humans Flock Together. Reposted from Telepolis.

Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind

Howard Bloom

It’s currently popular in evolutionary psychology to believe that the modern mind evolved in the Pleistocene, the hunter-gatherer stage of man’s existence. Yet most of what we are, of our personal emotions, our ways of doing things, and the manner in which we transmit and sum them, we share with far more primitive relatives.

Memes are one key to the next jump in networking. And memes come in two stripes: implicit, that means those which belong to the animal brain; and explicit, those which depend on hominid neural add-ons, the cranial gizmos responsible for syntactic speech.

Implicit memes – the ones transferred by spiny lobsters, birds, octopi and squid – are housed in a very old part of the brain indeed. Yet they dominate our lives, handling everything from the way we drive to our autopilot greetings, quarrels, reconciliations, unspoken cultural quirks, frustrations, and our joys. Even language is less our monopoly than we think. And the very queen of the brain’s humanity, the cerebral cortex, home of that narrative summarizer we call our consciousness, is not entirely human either.

So before we can understand ourselves, we must stick to our task and continue to dissect the past. We are new, but not as startlingly so as we would like to think.

Mammal Sociality

Mammals appeared 210 million years ago. Vertebrate paleontologists have closed their eyes to the rise of mammal sociality. They have a good excuse. The fossil record isn’t kind to those drawn to a sociological prize. Ancient mammals are almost never found intact and thronged like trilobites. Instead a triumphal dig turns up an isolated bone or two. Perhaps a single shin or tooth. Fleshing out the shape of the creature who left behind these pitiful remains is almost beyond the grasp of the finest explicit human brains. Only Argentina’s Jose Bonaparte seems to have found half a dozen early mammals huddled together in a truly ancient burrow. And even this jewel failed to wrench his colleagues from the rut of their routine pursuits.

Way back in 1982, John F. Eisenberg stepped bravely from the paleontological pack and summed up his theories on mammalian collegiality in an article he wrote for the “Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior”. Though Eisenberg has abandoned the quest for the origins of social networking since then, he made several important claims which have been echoed by other scientists in more recent years. Among them, that gregariousness between multi-celled eukaryotes must at the latest have begun with the birth of sexuality, some 800,000 years before the first mammal ever appeared. Said Eisenberg, sexuality forces animals of opposite gender to get together. No meeting, no mating.

Eisenberg put forth another proposition. To guarantee that discombobulated creatures do not miss their tryst by a month or two, the beings must communicate and synchronize. Courtship struts and battles set individuals to a public timer much like the clock which orchestrates computer components so they can waltz together. Flaring armored skulls and other signs of mating tournaments appear in abundance among dinosaurs. Brontotheres, behemoths with the horns and bodies of rhinoceroses, continued this Jurassic tradition. But brontotheres were not saurians. They were mammalians. Their armaments clearly showed that they were ticking to a social metronome.

The sexual embrace led to another superorganismic braid, that which bound the generations together. Quoth Eisenberg, parents and their young “can…exchange…stimuli which coordinate their activities.” Among mammals, contact between mothers and their brood was cemented by a unique form of food relay. Matriarchs shuttled the nutritional mix we know as milk from a specialized gland into their infants’ mouths. This coupled one temporal cohort to the next like a prong and socket. “Lactation,” to quote geneticist and evolutionist Timothy Perper, “represents an embodied nexus of sociality.” With mammals Lego-linkage was the name of the game from the moment after birth.

The dairy innovators’ tendency to long life and lengthy childhoods stretched the time when young and old were thrown together, encouraging another adaptive advantage – the storage of new data needed by the immature in parental memory. What’s more, mammalian communication systems would prove unbeatably flexible. With hard-won ancient lessons and newly minted tricks cartwheeling through the group and across each generation gap, a family or far larger horde could resculpt its lifestyle swiftly, making itself at home in a previously impossible environmental niche.

During the last eons of the dinosaurs, insect eating mammals, still eking out an existence in the shadows of the walking monoliths, already resembled modern shrews and hedgehogs. Then 65 million years ago, environmental catastrophe drove the dinosaurs from their homes and left the last remnants of them to starve in bleak and unfamiliar surroundings, their adaptive capabilities overwhelmed by circumstance. But in socially networked animals with larger brains, catastrophes are creative opportunities. Mammals, freed from hiding in bodies smaller than a dino-snack and in holes and crevasses too narrow for a dino’s claws, were challenged to let the full range of their flexibility run free.

Conformity Enforcers

The five principles of the complex adaptive system aided the survival of these rodent-like creatures.

Mammals like whales and bats, which appeared roughly 55 million years ago, have oodles of conformity enforcers, homogenizers which allow for common language and for the alignment of behavior between individuals. Information transmission among social mammals – whether handled by scent, sound or visual codes – tends to be swift. Rats avoid a strange food until they smell it on the breath of a den-mate. Then, assured by the survival of the poison-tester, they pounce on the previously suspicious morsel. This slavish timidity can save their lives. 

Squirrels also pool information, using their tail as a semaphore to signal trouble and to rally their companions. A twitching of this fur-fringed nether flag may mean there’s a snake around and bring others running to the rescue. A team of squirrels can track and isolate a snake more effectively than one squirrel on her own. Tail wagging in dogs seems to be a recruitment signal linked to celebration – one of many canine body codes. One wild dog cannot bring down a zebra. But a pack working together can. The striped and panicked prey is defeated not just by a myriad of teeth and claws, but by the operation of collective brainwork, the second-by-second tactical turns which fine tune the hunting tribe.

The urge to follow in the tracks of someone else – a consummate conformity enforcer – also speeds the spread of information among primates. When one baboon emits a warning call, it inspires others nearby to repeat it. So a necessary bit of news ricochets rapidly around the baboon territory.

Among monkeys, pioneering primatologist K. Ronald Hall noted how a bit of rubbish every beast despises can suddenly become popular. If one animal shows an unexpected interest in the detested thing, friends are likely to fall in line and become intrigued as well. ‘Tis another instance of that antique conformity enforcer: imitation.

The impulse to follow the crowd turns perception to a herd phenomenon even among baboons. Knowing how addicted baboons are to meat, primatologist Shirley Strum tried to make friends with a troop she called “the Pumphouse gang” by bringing them a carcass. At first, the baboons shied away from the flesh that had arrived in this strange manner. Then one savvy individual tried a bit of the food. After they saw one of their tribe eating the alien offering, the others descended to get their share.

Networked Intelligence

As among bacteria and bees, there is solid evidence that individual mammal brainpower is often less important than networked intelligence. K.R.L. Hall points out that on their own, chimps are more intelligent than baboons, even making their own tools. But baboons have been more successful than the brainy junior apes. Baboons have spread over far more territory and have occupied a greater variety of homes. Lone baboons may be rather dumb, but their group creativity is so great that on a continent most of whose exotic creatures are being wiped out, baboons have spread like cockroaches. Their secret is to find the potential bonanza in every new twist introduced by man. In the dry thorn veldt baboons use cattle drinking troughs and handle temperature extremes that go from 80 degrees by day to freezing at night. They live along the banks of the Zambezi and in the southern woodland savannahs. In fact, they’re “the most widely distributed non-human primates” in Africa. Why? Despite their skimpy endowment of solo smarts, baboons have something chimps lack – a vastly superior social organization. The average group of chimps is a mere 40 or so. Baboons, on the other hand, hang out in crowds three to six times that size.

Why does a heightened craving to hobnob give baboons an edge over chimps? Predators on the prowl usually only manage to snatch one member of a pack. So the bigger the assembly, the less chance any single member has of entering the day’s menu. This simple fact helps drive many animals into substantial groups. But once the resulting communities have formed, they take on a role we’ve examined in our previous episodes – as cauldrons of information exchange.

Early mammals are endowed with another of the complex adaptive system’s quintet – diversity generators. Baboon social learning is aided by an itchy creator of behavioral twists – curiosity. Some baboons will toy with nearly anything that comes across their path. Says Hall, baboons “push over slabs of rock” yank at telegraph wires, pry their way through the doors and windows of empty huts and cars, and overturn, crack open or “fiddle with and try out” nearly anything in sight. This restless test of oddities helps a baboon find new ways to get the most from almost any environment.

Conformity and diversity work together for the betterment of the larger whole. Like bacterial and honeybee scouts, baboons spread out in small groups during the day. The foolhardily inquisitive among them comb the possibilities of the landscape. Bacteria pool their exploratory discoveries via long-distance chemical communication. But baboons, who are a good deal more mobile, gather at night in sleeping clusters which may include hundreds. These overnight conventions breed data processing. In the morning, the troop’s males confer, swap their “ideas” about the direction in which the richest potential new food sources can be found, manage, according to one researcher, to create visions in the minds of their council-mates of the routes and potential rewards to which they imagine those trails will lead, then make group decisions on which way to go next.

Says USC’s Jane Goodall Research Center director Dr. Christopher Boehm, “in cases of emergencies (e.g., a river that floods and blocks the most likely direction of travel) this pooling of information can lead to significant conservation of energy for the entire troop. Because such emergency decisions seem to be influenced by males who have extensive experience with the environment, and because each individual’s experiences will differ, it is easy enough to imagine that different Hamadryas troops might make different tactical decisions about direction of travel under similarly threatening circumstances – for better or worse.”

Learning Machines

Another diversity generator – cultural separation – works hand in hand with imitative learning to enrich the knowledge of the tribe. When the Pumphouse gang was in danger of being shot as pests by the inhabitants of a new army barracks who resented having their homes entered, tossed and probed for edibles, rescuers flew the crowd to a distant location. The displaced baboons had no idea of the groceries in the new landscape and of the best way to get at them. But they watched and followed native troops to learn their ways. And young local males looking for new homes gravitated to the exotic band of strangers. One “applicant” for Pumphouse Gang admission dug for salt near a watering hole, something the new arrivals had never seen before. When the immigrants followed this native’s example, they added yet another skill to their repertoire. 

Hall has said that baboon groups provide “the essential setting for each and every act of learning by the individual…the group is the basic unit for… learning processes.” In short, baboons are more successful than the wiley chimpanzees because their troops are better learning machines.

Pre-human mammals not only network their informational breakthroughs across substantial distances, they also spread the tendrils of what they’ve learned into the future, thus penetrating both space and time. Elephants, for example, pass behavioral memes from one generation to the next. In 1919, the citrus farmers of South Africa’s Addo Park wanted to get rid of a herd of 140 elephants who’d been wreaking havoc with their crops. They called in a hunter who shot the elephants painfully, one by one, while their family members watched the dying agonies. After a year, only sixteen to 20 elephants still remained. But they had adapted their lives to the hunter’s presence. In a most un-elephant-like manner, they had become nocturnal, hiding in the bush until night fell, and stealing out to feed in utter darkness. The adaptation worked. The hunter eventually gave up. Then, in 1930, the elephants were granted permanent sanctuary. There were no more gunshots, no more attacks by murderous human beings. Yet 45 years later, the elephants retained their reclusive, night-time way of life. The veterans of 1919 had died off, but the group held on to patterns designed to cope with a danger that had long since past. Those patterns leaped the boundary from generation to generation and mind to mind. Implicit memes had shaped communal sensibility as surely as genes sculpt the rippling canyons of the brain.

Advanced brains were, in fact one key to the elephants’ multi-generational memory. The other was the bond of motherhood and matriarchy. Elephants, like the humans who would not appear for over 20 million years, possessed a cerebral cortex of substantial size. This is less unusual than it seems. Biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar has shown that the larger the size of a social unit, the larger the cortex of each member. This is even true within a single species. Bats were one of the earliest mammals to evolve. So ancient is their pedigree that many scientists have referred to them as “living fossils.” Like elephants, these flying mammals live long lives (one tagged wild bat in New England survived well over 31 years).

Most mothers nurture just one youngster at a time and do it for a lengthy span. A few bat species live solitary lives. The cerebral cortexes in these flying hermits are very small. Others live in colonies of up to 20 million. The vampire bat hunkers down in a cluster of 200 or so, yet each mother is able to find her own child when she returns at night from a lengthy flight, despite the fact that her son or daughter is hidden like a lost toddler on an overcrowded beach. What’s more, before she settles down, sated with her pickings, she will seek out the adult “babysitter” who tended the children while others were away and repay her with a bit of regurgitant. To top it off, if an unrelated neighbor has had slim pickings in its search for blood, a returning mother will disgorge some of her stomach contents to the needy. On a future night the bat who was aided when she was down on her luck will make her way through the bewildering mob to pay back her benefactress by offering her fresh food if she, too, has been starved by snarls of fortune. A cerebral cortex of substantial size makes it possible to pinpoint patrons and trade favors as if in a commodities exchange.

Elephant groups are also highly interlaced. Each troop focuses upon a female elder, relying on her strength and wisdom. Her cerebral cortex is enormous, holding lessons learned 40 years ago and shuttling them down the line to generations newly born.

To knock our homo chauvinism down a peg further, even language is not totally unique to us. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney have shown that though monkeys don’t gush a steady stream of nouns, verbs and sentences, they do erupt with symbolic sounds which act as words. Most famous are the vervets, whose distinctive chutters and whirs warn of killer birds circling the skies, lethal snakes slithering on the ground, and leopards stalking at eyeball height. Each word must be different, for the response that would allow escape from a cat – going high into a tree – is a surefire way to become an eagle canape. Even more remarkable is the fact that vervets have more than a single term for each of their dangers. Every call has synonyms – different sounds with the same meanings. One more element of human uniqueness anticipated long before we first walked this earth.

Through three diversity generators–curiosity, cultural separation, and novel attempts at behavior (like those of the elephant who first became nocturnal) – early mammals generated implicit “behavioral” memes, improvising tricks which could be passed from one brain to another. Those memes, wafting wordlessly through a group, took advantage of conformity enforcers to shape the behavior of a mass. At least two of the elements of the complex adaptive system were at work in mammals long before the appearance of the first Homo sapiens. We’ll soon see how the other three petals of the adaptive pentagram were snapping into place as well. Just as they had among bacteria, networking and the group brain were busy doing their thing in the Age of Mammals 60 million years ago.

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

This morning we feature part five of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”, 4) The Embryonic Meme. Reposted from Telepolis.

Why Birds and Humans Flock Together

Howard Bloom

For most of human history, the need to eke a living from the earth kept over 90% of the human population in the countryside. But once a small number could produce food for multitudes, a formerly repressed desire went hog-wild – our urge to cram together. Today, more than 75% of Europeans and North Americans have crowded into cities. In Belgium the figure tops 95%. This lust for company has hit the developing world even harder. In a measly two generations, Mexico’s urban congregants have leaped from 25% to 70% of the population. Mexico City is now jammed with 27 million human beings, roughly three times the worldwide number of Hominids alive at even the lushest moment of the Paleolithic age.

Bird Flocks

Many species of birds are as attracted to their equivalent of the big city as we are, and given the chance, will congregate in the largest clusters they can possibly form. Some bird flocks outdo the largest human municipalities by a factor of two – reaching 50 million or more. This sociable overcrowding seems to court extraordinary risk. The larger the flock, the larger the territory it must cover to feed itself, and the greater the chances of encountering a famine. So why do avians become hypnotized by the urge to join a crowd?

The first guess ornithologists came up with was warmth. In winter, they reasoned, the birds could huddle, providing each other with protection from freezing cold. When researchers compared the energy costs of joining a roost to the energy saved by communal heat, the results were rather surprising. If the roost is thickly populated, the daily distance from home base to food is likely to involve an arduous commute. The calories burned in travel by far outweigh the pittance saved by toasty snuggles, swallowing 27% of a starling’s entire intake for the day. Overnighting alone in a sheltered hollow – despite the need to generate extra body heat – would exact nowhere near that price.

Why then, do birds congregate in avian megalopolises? There is something far more critical than energy to be gained – information. Birds rely for their perception of the world on those around them. If you recall the experiment on imitative learning among octopi from our previous episode, this will sound like deja vu all over again. Experimenters put a young, inexperienced blackbird and an older, wiser flier in cages side by side. The savvy elder was shown an owl, and attacked the potential killer furiously. The youngster couldn’t see the predator. Sly experimenters had placed a partition in his line of sight. But he definitely could witness the emergency response.

Not that there was nothing to surprise the junior bird as well. On his side of the opaque divider appeared a stuffed honey eater, a congenial creature which does not feast on blackbird meat. The setup was designed to convey the impression that the elder’s pugnacity had been roused by the harmless sweet-snacker. Later the young bird was put next to an unseasoned fledgling like itself. Both were shown the honey eater. The newcomer was indifferent. But the bird who’d seen his elder go into a rage flew at the bee-juice connoisseur, assaulting it with might and main. Soon the novice picked up the message and joined in. Then it, too, was paired with a naive bird who couldn’t have cared less. Like his teacher before him, the bird who’d learned his lesson demonstrated the importance of mobbing honey eaters to his pupil, passing the tradition on. Erroneous as it was, this response was reproduced in six blackbird generations before the researchers called it quits.

OK, birds have imitative learning. What’s so astonishing about that? We’ve already shown the imitative passage of data in creatures as primitive as spiny lobsters 260 million years ago. And we’ve explained how emulative absorption acted like a synapse, allowing information to leap the gap from one creature to another. But a whole new kind of information processor arises when neurons or independent beings join more than mere bucket brigades. Huddled like roosting birds in the brain-precursor called a ganglion, neurons can swap and compare data by the batch, arriving at something far beyond mere linear transmission. Each adding to the mosaic, they can see the big picture. Or, to switch from church floor imagery to that of the kitchen counter, when kneaded, stretched and rolled by a social cluster, you never know what forms of output input will become.

In 1973, Amot Zahavi, the eminent Israeli naturalist, posited that the roost was an “information center.” From 1988-1990, John and Colleen Marzluff of the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute in Meridian, Idaho, and Bernd Heinrich from the University of Vermont attempted to test the notion. They focussed their attention on ravens (Corvus corax) living in western Maine’s pine forests. Their technique was to capture wild ravens and to keep these carrion consumers caged until all their existing knowledge about food locations was thoroughly out of date. Then the experimenters put a fresh carcass – the ultimate raven cold-cut buffet – in a previously unused site, let the birds in on its coordinates by showing them the lump of meat as the sun was setting, and set the newly enlightened ravens free. The next day, only one of the 26 birds let in on the secret showed up – leading 30 ravens from a roost over a mile away. During the next few days, two more of the experimentally isolated ravens also came back to feast on the cadaver. Each had a trail of roost-mates in its wake. From this and a variety of other experiments and observations, the three researchers concluded that “Raven roosts are mobile information centres” in which the birds, by means unknown, swap data on where succulent cadavers are to be found, then follow the bird most in the know the next day when the flock takes off. In addition, the ravens share their information with others far away, engaging in a “social soaring display” which can attract hungry and clueless conspecifics from up to thirty miles.

So Zahavi had been right. Roosts, at least among ravens, are collective data processors. What’s more, they are part of local networks, pooling data between strangers for the sake of all.

Somewhere between 145 million years ago, when the first feathered reptile, the archaeopteryx, arose, and 120 mya when modern birds appeared, imitative learning among vertebrates went from serial to parallel wiring, making a social group a learning machine. The mechanism for massed learning and collective adaptation was apparently at work in the herding and hunting beasts we know as dinosaurs. Paleontologist Robert Bakker hypothesizes that the herd allowed dinosaur herbivores to pool the input from their eyes, ears and nostrils, then mount a carefully phalanxed defense. Dino-carnivores were even subtler in their use of networking. Bakker suggests that like today’s lions, they teamed up to stage elaborate stratagems. One Utahraptor might act as a decoy, distracting the attention of a brontosaurus pack. Meanwhile its hunt-mates would surround the prey and take it from behind. But how did communal learning machines arise among Jurassic kings and queens?

To understand the global brain’s anatomy as it continues to unfold, we will have to take a side trip into theory. Specifically we’ve got to machete further down the path of complex adaptive systems. Later we will once again resort to theory, proposing a new model of cosmic basics. But one new concept at a time.

The exploration of adaptive systems I’m offering you does NOT come from complexity’s Mecca, the Santa Fe institute. And unlike other theories on the subject, it is not based on computer simulations. It is the result of 29 years of fieldwork observing the real thing – social nets in action. The insights of Santa Fe systems modelers like John Holland have helped me greatly in this enterprise. But the principles I will enunciate emerge from a more elemental technique – that which Darwin used – venturing first-hand into the wilderness, accumulating reports from other empirical frontiersmen, and running vast quantities of data through numerous conceptual sieves in an effort to isolate nuggets of gold.

Essentials of a Collective Learning Machine

The result is a five-element dissection of a collective learning machine. The quintet of essentials: (1) conformity enforcers; (2) diversity generators; (3) utility sorters; (4) resource shifters; and (5) intergroup tournaments.

• 1. Conformity enforcers impose enough similarity on group members to give the social structure coherence, relative permanence, and the ability to carry out large-scale, integrated, multi-participant projects. In humans, conformity enforcers lead, among other things, to a collective perception, a socially-constructed view of reality which influences both childhood brain development and adult sensory processing, and which produces a weltanschauung displaying many of the characteristics of a shared hallucination.
  
  
• 2. Diversity generators spawn variety. Each individual represents a hypothesis in the communal mind. It is vital for the group’s flexibility that it have numerous fallback positions in the form of participants sufficiently different to provide approaches which, while they may not be necessary today, could prove vital tomorrow. This can easily be seen in the operation of one of nature’s most superb learning machines, the immune system. The immune system contains 10(7)-10(8) different antibody types, each a separate conjecture about the nature of a potential invader. However diversity generators take on their most intriguing dimensions among human beings.
  
  
• 3. Next come the utility sorters. Utility sorters are systems which sift through individuals, favoring those whose contributions are most likely to be of value. These pitiless evaluators toss those who personify faulty guesswork into biological, psychological and perceptual limbo. Some utility sorters are external to the individual. But a surprising number are internal. That is, they are involuntary components of a being’s physiology.
  
  
• 4. Fourth are the resource shifters. Successful learning machines shunt vast amounts of assets to the individuals who show a sense of control over the current social and external environment. These same learning machines cast individuals whose endowments seem extraneous into a state of relative deprivation. Christ captured the essence of the algorithm when he observed “to him who hath it shall be given; from he who hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away.”
  
  
• 5. And bringing up the rear are intergroup tournaments, battles which force each collective entity, each group brain, to continually churn out fresh innovations for the sake of survival.

To understand how these five principles affect you and me, it may be helpful to reexamine the workings of a group brain in an organism normally thought to have no intelligence at all: our old friend the bacterium.

Bacterial Group Brain

In the late 1980s, two scientists we’ve frequently met before, University of Tel Aviv physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob and the University of Chicago’s James Shapiro, were perplexed. Those supposed lone rangers known as bacteria actually lived in colonies which established elaborate designs as they expanded. Some rippled in ringlets. Others snaked in symmetrical tracery like that generated by graphic depictions of fractal equations.

Ben-Jacob detoured from normal physics and spent five years studying bacillus subtilis. Meanwhile Shapiro focused on such organisms as E. coli and salmonella. Unlike the traditional biologists who had preceded him, Ben Jacob applied an unconventional tool to his data: the insights he had absorbed from the mathematics of materials science. New developments in this field suggested that the elaborate patterns formed by bacterial colonies might be the result of the same processes which produce patterning in water, crystals, soil and rocks. The Israel physicist felt that this was wrong and set out to separate the products of “azoic” (non-living) processes from those which he suspected were the results of microbial hyperactivity.

Meanwhile among microbiologists another mystery was gumming up the works. Standard neo-Darwinism said that bacteria stumble from one innovation to another by random mutation. But a growing body of evidence was accumulating to indicate that bacterial mutations are not completely random. Seemingly every month fresh studies continued to suggest that these mutations might, in fact, be genetic alterations “custom-tailored” to overcome the emergencies of the moment.

Ben Jacob confirmed what he had suspected all along. Something far more than the principles which shape inanimate matter was at work within the petri dish. Separate investigations by Shapiro and Ben Jacob uncovered a surprise, one which answered the puzzle of bacteria’s seemingly purposeful alterations and now threatens to topple long established evolutionary models. Rather than being a mere carrier of construction plans, the package of genes carried by each individual bacterium functioned as a computer. What’s more, the genetic-bundle seemed to accomplish something even computers cannot achieve. Says Ben Jacob, “the genome makes calculations and changes itself according to the outcome.” Unlike an assembly of silicon chips, the genome adapts to unaccustomed problems by reprogramming itself.

Reaching this conclusion left a puzzle. Godel’s theorem implies that one computer cannot design another computer with more sophisticated computational powers than its own. So how does the individual bacterium’s central processing unit confront large-scale catastrophe, natural disaster so overwhelming that it dwarfs the bacteria’s solo computational abilities? The answer, Ben-Jacob hypothesized, lay in networking – in knitting the colony’s multitude of genomic personal computers into something beyond even the massively parallel distributed processor known as a supercomputer. A supercomputer is only faster than its less sophisticated cousins, but does not transcend many of the smaller machine’s most basic limitations. At heart both are merely diligent instruction repeaters. However the “creative net” of the bacilli, unlike a machine, can invent a new instruction set with which to beat an unfamiliar challenge.

Ben-Jacob has now analyzed thousands of colonies of bacilli to find out if his creative network hypothesis is true, and if so what makes the collective information-processor work. We’ve seem some elements of his conclusion in earlier chapters: bacilli are in constant contact, communicating through a wide variety of means, measuring their environment’s limitations and opportunities, and feeding their data to each other, then finally summing the product through collaborative decision. In short, bacilli engage in many of the basic activities we associate with human beings.

Here’s how Ben-Jacob’s work appears when filtered through the lens of a social learning machine’s five principles:

• Bacillus colonies utilize the most basic conformity enforcer – the genome, which restricts the range of forms and of operating methods among the colony’s individuals. The resulting semi-uniformity makes it possible for every member of the community to “understand” a common collection of “languages.”
  
  
• Bacillus subtilis colonies employ a variety of diversity generators. Says Ben-Jacob, bacterial clones (genetically identical offspring of the same mother) can assume intriguingly different variations. Which form each dons depends on the chemical signals it picks up from the herd around it. These cues activate or deactivate individual genes, redrawing a bacteria’s design and replacing its old operations manual. In the best of times, when food is plentiful, the colony clumps together for the feast. Divergent appetites and digestive abilities are vital to a gorging group’s survival. The bacteria which concentrate on mining the new food source produce a poisonous by-product – bacterial excreta, the equivalent of feces and urine. Other bacteria adopt an entirely different metabolic mode. To them the excrement is caviar. By snacking heartily on toxic waste, they prevent the colony from killing itself.

  More diversity generators kick in when the colony’s glut runs out. We’ve already seen some of them at work in 3.5 billion year old stromatolites. As famine approaches, individuals send out a chemical signal which makes them socially obnoxious, a “body odor” that says “spread out, flee, explore.” This prods roughly 10,000 groups of cells to act as scouting parties, setting forth in a trek which unfolds before the human eye in the forms which had first caught Ben Jacob’s attention, concentric circles, thick fingers flaring from a central core, or a spreading circle of fractal lace. Meanwhile other cellular cohorts apparently set up posts in the wake of the outward advance and channel the findings of the explorers toward the center.
  

• At this stage the teams of pioneers (technically called “random walkers”) utilize the third principle of a complex adaptive system: the colony’s utility sorters. Those exploration parties which find slim pickings have an internal device, the bacterial equivalent of what British theorist Michael Waller, writing about human beings, has called a “comparator mechanism.” This gauge determines that the outriders have chanced across parched and dangerous territory. Their mission, in short, has failed. The unfortunates send out the altruistic repellent which makes others in the group avoid them, leaving them to starve in isolation.

  Conversely, discoverers which encounter a cornucopia of edibles have their comparator mechanisms tweaked in the opposite direction. They disperse an attractant which makes them the star of the party.
  

• Now the fourth principle of the complex adaptive system enters the petri dish: the resource shifters. Those stranded in the desert are deprived of nutrients – which their location cannot provide – of companionship, and most important from the point of view of the group brain, robbed of what might best be termed popularity. Meanwhile, those who find an overflowing buffet eat their fill and command the attention and protection of a gathering crowd. They are transformed into leaders, guiding the group mind. “To him who hath it shall be given; from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away.”

  Should things prove truly grim, however, and even the most strenuous searchers confirm that food is nowhere within reach, another diversity generator, the most startling of them all, may rouse to meet the challenge. It is that mechanism which James Shapiro calls the “genetic engineer.” Let us allow Ben-Jacob to repeat something we’ve already touched upon: “the cell carries a complete set of tools for genetic self-reconstruction: plasmids, phages, transposons and too many others to mention…the same tools, in fact, used in the lab today for genetic engineering.” A microscopic research and development squadron goes to work recrafting its own genetic string.

  Which raises a question: does the genomic skunkworks merely trot out pre- fabricated parts which have worked in the past? Or is it capable of true innovation?

  This is when Ben-Jacob devised his tests of bacterial ingenuity, putting the poor creatures into nightmare environments whose like they’d never encountered before. If all the microbial team could do was recycle ancient programs, it would be finished. But that is not what happened. Through data pooling, experimentation, and tests of novel strategies, the bacteria managed to refashion themselves in radically new ways. This was not traditional random mutation at work. This was driven, inspired conception.

  Thanks to the synergy of the conformity enforcer, the diversity generator, the utility sorter, and the resource shifter, the colony was capable of something numerous humans never achieve – creativity.
  

• In a natural environment, the fifth of a complex adaptive system’s principles would presumably come into play: the intergroup tournament. Alas, until recently Ben Jacob has studied each colony isolated in its own petri dish, sealed off by plastic walls from competing groups. But as the resources which feed the bacillus subtilis run out, imagine what might happen if a spore of another bacterial species were to drop in, a species which found the inedible plateau on which the subtilis was stranded to be more nourishing than sauerbraten. The race would be on. While the bacillus subtilis reworked its genome in an effort to gain sustenance from the now (to it) barren waste, the newcomer would rush to reproduce, taking advantage of the fact that subtilis’ inedible slabs are its entrÈe du jour.

  As the two groups struggled to take over the petri dish, would a new innovation emerge from the contest, an innovation of the sort which enriches the fate of a species for eons? One which adds abundance to the environment, complexifying the planetary biomass, transforming ever more of this once barren planet into food for life?

Learning Machine in Raven Colonies

We have already seen these principles at work among crayfish, birds and bees. The raven who succeeds in spotting a banquet gains followers and magnetism. It is quite likely that he also wins the privileges of hierarchical rank – first dibs on mates, food, and the most comfortable overnight accommodations. The genes which make him a raven like his brethren are conformity enforcers. So are the tugs of imitative learning which pull him toward flying meekly with the flock. The maverick nature which causes him to buck that impulse is a form of diversity generator. It allows him to soar over territory his fellows have not explored, and thus to make new finds.

When his search is victorious, utility sorters shift the raven’s hormonal gears, giving him internally-generated strength and confidence. Biology rewards him with an attitude which will draw a following. Cockiness is his equivalent of a bacteria’s chemical attractor. This is equally true for innumerable species. The amount of chemotactic allure a bacteria can generate determines its leadership. The enthusiasm of a scout bee advertising a new find determines the number of followers she will attract. The regal strutting of a spiny lobster winner almost certainly helps captivate adherents who will follow him in his trek away from a glacial freeze. Each of these creatures has been turbocharged internally by success. And that endogenous upgrade makes all the difference in the world.

Meanwhile social machinery outside the new leader’s physiological fabric sets the resource shifters into motion, honing to unbeatable sharpness his or her edge in nutrition, reproduction and influence. Very simply put, as the champion’s hormones give him a boost, other inner chemicals downshift his former rivals and impel them to defer to him, funneling the group’s bounty in his direction.

Finally, intergroup tournaments increase the odds that those groups which stumble in their use of the previous four mechanisms will also fail to survive. If faulty physiology draws you to the wrong leader, you are likely to leave no genetic or memetic legacy in your wake.

So ravens pool their findings and follow those who have demonstrated a record of meaty discoveries and of organizational savvy beneficial to the bunch. Raven flocks even share news of their richest treasures with aggregations from miles away, as if they knew that through this worldwide- webbish generosity, they would survive the famines which permanently down those who selfishly hog their data.

These are some of the secrets of the nascent global brain. Robert Bakker has inferred that this quintet of principles was at work among velociraptors and astrodons 120 million years ago. New finds of early birds (Confuciusornis) from the same era also hint that the beasts with the novel feathers may have used the five principles of a complex adaptive system in their group behavior. And we will soon see how the learning machine’s pentagram extended its embrace to human beings.

Copyright © 1996-2001. All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

This morning we feature part four of our series on the global brain from an important book by Howard Bloom. See: 1) Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain, 2) Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age, 3) Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”. Reposted from Telepolis.

The Embryonic Meme

Howard Bloom

When we last left off, bacteria and viruses had developed both local networked intelligence and the grander web we call a global brain. Meanwhile new, highly complex cells – the eukaryotes – had broken fresh ground in intranetting. Half a billion years of eukaryotic upgrades (2.1 billion b.c. to 1.6 billion bc) had led to multicellular creatures-beasts of infinitely greater talent than the prokaryotes preceding them. But the new macro-organisms were missing something: the worldwide information swap available to their microbial competitors. They had gained innumerable gifts, but had lost their worldwide mind!

One of the dramatis personae with which we ended was the clam, which bowed into the fossil record at 720 million B.C. That bivalve probably possessed an information processing device we failed to mention – memory. Memory exists in insects, mollusks, and many of the life forms which came into existence during the Cambrian explosion. Recent research has demonstrated that even the lowly fruit fly, a relative of Cambrian antecedents, has a storage system which works in the same stages as ours – short term memory leading to mid-term memory and finally long-term memory – all made possible, as with humans, only if the fly does not cram its lessons but sips them slowly, taking periods of rest for data digestion.

Researchers have recently pinpointed the pre-Jurassic genes responsible for this sequence in insects, shellfish, chicks, and humans. Recall another actor in our previous episode-the internal cellular messenger known as cyclic AMP. Cyclic AMP was a holdover from bacterial days, one which became even more essential to multicellular beings, and which continues to carry out its roles in you and me. Researchers at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab are convinced that sometime before 200 million years BC, a knowledge-accumulator gene called dCREB2 harnessed cyclic AMP for a new purpose-rapid data storage. (CREB stands for cyclic-AMP-responsive element-binding protein.)

Before eukaryotic cells emerged, information had been saved in chromosomes-welded chains of coded nucleotides. In bacteria, altering these genetic files had been relatively easy. But the complexity of eukaryotes had a drawback: their DNA archives were a thousand times vaster than those of their predecessors. This size had pluses and minuses. The functions eukaryotes could handle expanded exponentially. But their flexibility and swiftness of adaptation underwent a staggering decline. The genetic libraries which had been RAM now approached the immobility of ROM.

When neural memory appeared, the effect was dramatic. A multi-celled creature could quickly store experience in flexible circuitry. Hardware alteration led to equally startling software. A new data device augmented the gene. Zoologist Richard Dawkins calls it the meme.

Memes were not transmissible via inch-long chains of adenine, cytosine, guanosine, and thymine corkscrewed in a microscopic clump. They were relayed via scent, sight and sound. Memes were form indifferent to the substance which carried them. They would provide the key first to a knowledge explosion, and later to the evolution of a whole new style of worldwide web.

This episode will chronicle the early rise of memory’s child-learning – the medium in which memes thrive. It will also move from the networks which turned several trillion cells into a larger organism to the meta-networks which could knit a group of 30,000 or more multi-cellular animals into a superorganism, one endowed with 60,000 eyes, 60,000 ears, trillions of scent receptors, and 30,000 brains.

Virtually all the phyla swimming, walking, flying and crawling the earth today arose in a blink of geologic time. The event-the Cambrian explosion-lasted a mere 40 million years.

Fossil evidence of information networking among Cambrian creatures has not yet been subjected to systematic analysis. But we have a tool with which to probe their data-connection systems. That is inference. Many of the behaviors dominating Cambrian descendants today were likely to have contributed to the evolutionary success of their venerable ancestors.

Cambrian parvenus included: relatives of choanocytes (sponges); onychophorans (worm-like beasts with 14-43 pairs of legs found mostly today in Australia); mollusks (snails, squid, octopi, oysters and clams), echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sea lilies); and perhaps most important, crustaceans (spiders, shrimp, crabs, and insects); and chordates (early vertebrates).

Among the Cambrian crustaceans were the Eurypterids, prototypes of the scorpions which may well have been the first land-walkers. How modern were these seven-foot-long, twelve-legged beasts? Skeletal remains indicate they carried the equipment standard to even the lowliest contemporary arthropod: a digestive tract beginning in a mouth, leading to a stomach and ending in an anus; a central nervous system complete with brain; a focal ganglionic cable similar to the chord innervating your spine; and an extensive lace of wiring which delicately controlled the limbs and everything between them. In addition, these proto-scorpions of the Cambrian possessed sensors to detect internal movement, orientation in space, and the visual, tactile and smell-detecting contraptions necessary to pinpoint any scourge or temptation gliding in the waters around them. Some of these sensory organs were astonishingly intricate. Eurpyterid eyes, according to invertebrate zoologist Dr. Kerry B. Clark, could be six inches long. Their size, Clark feels, indicates that there was “one hell of a lot of neural processing going on in there.”

Once you have visual detectors and a central nervous system, you are equipped to do elaborate versions of something individual bacteria could only master in a limited way. Take, for example, a descendent of the pre-Cambrian mollusks-the octopus. Put a modern octopus in a large glass jar. Give it lots of room to move. Dangle something harmless outside the walls of its receptacle. Don’t worry, it can see. Try, for example, a teddy bear. Whenever the stuffed animal appears, electrically zap the octopus. After a bunch of tries, unplug your shock producers, pop the Steiff bear within the octopus’ viewing range, and whomp-the beast will jet itself in the opposite direction. Learning!

But can this form of prudence be networked-can it be passed from one octopus to another? Most certainly. Bring in an equally transparent container housing a second octopus. Place it next to the octopus you’ve trained. Now show the pre-punished tentacle-bearer the stuffed toy. As it whooshes back in panic, its naive neighbor will be watching. Try the experiment a few more times, just to make sure the newcomer gets the message. No, it has never been stung by shock. But yes, it has seen its fellow water denizen indicate that when a cuddly bear appears there may be trouble in the offing. Now isolate octopus number two and show it the plaything. It will follow the lead of its more experienced conspecific and recoil with a speed that will astonish you. What’s more, it will catch on faster by following the cues of another octopus than if forced to learn on its own. Congratulations. You have just uncovered one synapse of a social brain-imitative learning.

You have also witnessed the operation of a primordial meme. No cellular material was exchanged. Only photons connected the two creatures. Yet the neural response of one octopus was reproduced in the brain of the other.

Alas we have no Cambrian trilobites or proto-scorpions on which to run this experiment. However the number of Cambrian creatures with a central nervous column and a brain was vast. The eyes and sensors of these creatures were intricate and varied. It is a distinct possibility that some of them may have been among the first practitioners of monkey see, monkey do.

The emulative compulsion is one of the critical immaterials from which collective brains are made. Shortly after 500 million b.c., there arose the fish…emulators par excellence. Schooling is one of a fish’s most pivotal defenses. A mob of potential fillets swims together in unison, each carefully heeding the cues it gets from others. As long as the frontal portion of its brain is intact, it will slavishly follow the crowd. The advantage: a group of relative midgets can ripple like a giant sheet, light glinting off its scales in such a way that a predator is dazzled and has difficulty focussing attention on any single victim.

How much do fish rely on imitative learning? To what extent can their neural settings be rearranged by proto-memes? Regard the guppy-one of evolution’s early experiments in fish morphology. Female guppies are instinctively biased to prefer males of a deep orange hue. But this does not mean they are immune to the imitative learning we call fashion. Isolate a guppy from the crowd and train her to prefer a male who is paler than the normal sex-arousing shade. Let her loose again among her sisters. They will watch her amorous attraction to suitors they had previously shunned. Calibrating their behavior to that of the taste-maker, others will soon begin a piscine swoon over the formerly repulsive pallid beaus. Dawkins gives the memetic example of a melody which infects one human mind after another. But in guppies, movement cues and preferences in skin tone are equally contagious.

Once a social group, no matter how primitive, possesses imitative learning, the modern data network has begun. Individuals become components of a collective intelligence, one which, like a colony of bacteria, is expert in what Eshel Ben Jacob calls “quorum sensing”-summing individual decisions to arrive at a cooperative-conclusion.

Extrapolating backwards once again we can deduce that another Cambrian descendant introduced a second essential tool into the life of the sea: the social hierarchy.

Among the first crustaceans were tiny Cambrian shrimp. Their later relatives, crayfish and lobsters, emerged sometime after 260 million b.c. These decapods most likely had mastered imitative behavior. Among the first to evolve were spiny lobsters. Some spiny lobsters engage in an imitative seasonal migration, parading substantial distances through the seas in single file, each following the path and demeanor of the one before it. It has been hypothesized that spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) evolved this slavish march to cope with periodic glaciation.

Dominance hierarchies extended these creatures’ capabilities by delegating specialized responsibilities to seemingly identical group members. Bacteria had divvied up tasks, but they had done it by altering the genetic content of a newborn, committing it to a specific social purpose for life. Inherent in lobsters and crayfish, on the other hand, was the capacity to assume any role the group needed, and the set of switches it took to turn those abilities on or off. This gave a cluster of crustaceans the capacity for a rapid reprogramming which, in bacteria, had depended on population turnover. (Bacteria spawn a new generation every 20 minutes.)

Lobsters live in clusters of cave-like dugouts beneath the sea. At night, the males grow restless and roam about, tapping on the door of each neighbor. The lobster inside comes to the entrance and faces off with the intruder. The showdown’s goal is to see who is larger. If the visitor can tower over his rearing host, the apartment dweller vacates his home. The larger lobster knocks around the new abode for a bit, then goes off to the next cave for a visit. If the Homarus making these night-time rounds is large enough, by evening’s end he’s flushed all his neighbors from their lairs. Later, he lets them return. But he’s proven a point. He is in charge. Gradually we will see the impact of this ritual-repeated in forms right up to office politics-on collective intelligence.

Next comes the role of hormones in temporarily restructuring the individual. After a pushing match in which the combatants whip their antennae and lock claws, the winner struts regally on the tips of his toes. The loser slinks subserviently backward. The victor’s confidence comes from serotonin. The loser’s dejection from octopamine. Studies of equivalent clashes in crayfish reveal that serotonin alters neuron activity so significantly that Stanford University’s Russ Fernald says “the animal in some sense has a different brain….”

Serotonin remains a critical hormone in human beings. It is regulated by dominance or submission. From episode to episode we shall see the importance of serotonin in the unfolding group mind as well.

In 350 million B.C. another Cambrian descendent appeared-the insect. At first, says legendary entomologist E.O. Wilson, insects were probably solitary. The fossil evidence supporting this conclusion is strong but not definitive. Invertebrate zoologist Dr. K.B. Clark points out, “The most primitive living insects are very similar, morphologically, to the oldest fossils. They’re solitary. These are things like springtails. But social behavior has arisen convergently in Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Isoptera, and maybe a couple of other orders, so might occur earlier than noted.” Clark adds that even springtails are not as individualistic as they are generally portrayed. Their fossilized remains are often found in herd-like clumps. In Insect Societies and his much later book The Ants, Wilson groups together those contemporary insects which live on their own, those which have a rough-hewn sociality, and those which have taken their social structures to the nth degree (”eusociality”), then assumes that the loners must have evolved first. Frankly, this is questionable. As we’ve seen, grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons.

Similarly, replicators-RNA, DNA, and genes-have always worked in teams. Often teams so huge as to defy description. The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and probably the echinoderms (proto-starfish) of the Cambrian age. It is entirely possible, then, that the first insects may well have been social, and that their more solitary relatives could have been later offshoots who had mastered the difficult trick of survival in relative isolation. One indication comes from evidence that 300 million years ago, proto-cockroaches (Cryptocercidae-like insects) occupied tunnel-like group homes in dead tree ferns.

The discovery of 100 fossilized nests in Arizona’s Petrified Forest hints that one extremely social insect may have been building hives as early as 220 million b.c.-Apoidea: the bee. Thomas Seeley, perhaps the leading contemporary expert on bee behavior, has been awed for over a decade by the extent to which colonies of swarmers pool their meager intellects to create a vaster calculating mechanism. Seeley presented a sophisticated account of this observation in a 1987 article he called “A Colony of Mind: The Beehive As Thinking Machine,” (co-written with Royce A. Levien, The Sciences, July/August). Seeley’s 1995 The Wisdom of the Hive fleshes out the details of the theme.

Like guppies, bees are slaves to meme contagion. In one experiment, researchers put two dishes of sugar water close to a pair of hives. Each solution was equally nutritious. Then the scientists trained a few bees from hive A to visit dish A. The bees of hive A obediently followed their pre-trained scouts. Despite the high caloric content of the second dish, all ignored it and drank only from the “pre-approved” container, carrying drops of its contents back to their home base. The bees in the second hive were tricked by the same technique into following the leader and visiting only dish B. There was no significant number of deviants in either hive. In a very real sense, the bees had been transformed from a chaos of individuals to a single mind. Their transmuter: imitative learning.

The result is capable of remarkable “mental” feats. I described in my book, The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history, an experiment in which apian flyers were given an inadvertent group IQ test. A dish of sweetened-water was placed outside the hive. The bees soon found it and, following the leader, concentrated their collective attention on mining every glucose molecule within it. The next day, the dish was moved to a location twice as far from the hive. The bees used two of those tricks which make a group brain function-hierarchy and task specialization-to pinpoint the new target area. While the mass of followers clung meekly to their honeycombs, a handful of “independent thinkers” flew about at will, testing one spot then another for food. The division of labor soon resulted in the discovery of the sugar dish’s location. Now the herd instinct which results from imitative learning took over. The sheep-like multitude followed those who had made the find and combined their efforts to exploit the food source for all it was worth.

The following day, the experimenters once again set the dish twice as far from the hive as on the previous occasion. And once again the scouts fanned out, a myriad of eyes and antennae gathering input for a collective mind. Once again the dish was spotted and the herd of follower bees swarmed to maximize their prize.

Then came the part that astonished the researchers. Each day they doubled the distance from dish to hive. The flight path’s length followed a simple arithmetic progression. After several days the swarm no longer waited for its scouts to return with news of the latest coordinates. Instead, when experimenters arrived to set down the sugar water, they found the bees had preceded them. Like multiple transistors crowded on the chip of a pocket calculator, the massed bees had predicted the next step in a mathematical series. But unlike the electronic calculator, they had perceived the existence of that series without the aid of a human pushing buttons.

There are more secrets to apian collective intelligence than division of labor, hierarchical organization, and the efficiency imparted by imitation. A fourth is quorum sensing. Each scout fans an eccentric path in search of food. If she spies a promising cache, she does not operate on impulse. She doubles and triple checks her conclusions, reflying the path several times to memorize its bearings. She returns to the hive interior and uses one of the first forms of symbolic representation known in evolution-the waggle dance. Cakewalking on an upright wall of the hive’s lightless interior, she performs a figure eight. Its orientation indicates the direction of her find relative to the position of the sun. The speed of her movement, the number of times she repeats it, and the fervor of her noisy waggling indicate the richness of the food source and the difficulty in flying there (half a mile in a stiff wind consumes far more energy than the same distance cruised through placid air). Her audience follows her, sniffing the scent of food she carries, feeling her movements, alert not only to the instructions each motion imparts, but to the judgements implied in the performer’s “enthusiasm.”

Despite the initial messenger’s caution in verifying her conclusions, the masses are not easily swayed. Other scouts make the trip, reach their own judgements, then return to waggle-dance their verdicts. The more vigorous and numerous the corroborative performances, the more persuasive is the data. Several bees usually make separate discoveries. Some of the finds are richer and easier to reach than others. The greater the payoff, the more scouts are impelled to fly out and verify the reports for themselves. The more returning skeptics who stage confirmations, the more bees are allocated to working the patch. The number of converts is affected by the fact that a bee who has discovered a jackpot will jitterbug far longer than one who has encountered a mediocre flower zone. The longer the shimmy, the greater the number of indecisive foragers able to catch the show.

This process consumes time, but its accuracy and its ability to retune as one patch of flowers is exhausted and another discovered is critical. A hive has just a few short months in which to store a supply of honey. If it fails to gather the necessary minimum, it is likely to run out of supplies before winter ends. This means certain death-not just for the frailer bees among the bunch, but for the entire community. It means the extinction of the superorganism’s gene lines and of its collective mind. Each incoming scout’s dance has contained small errors. By pooling and averaging inputs, onlookers are able to home in on their destinations with impressive accuracy. The mass mind has once again made calculations beyond the capacity of any single bee.

Division of labor has also played its role-non-conformists performed the risky task of exploration. And conformists ensured that a crush of crowd power would be unleashed on the most advantageous missions.

Statistics may give a sense of how critical cooperation and hierarchy are to this collaborative task. It takes 50 bees and a queen before the workers feel impelled to build the combs of a new domicile. Without a queen, it takes 5,000. When a colony runs out of resources, it splits. A huge swarm chooses a queen of its own and leaves the old queen’s hive in search of fresh quarters. Hanging in a balled clump from a branch, the homeless pioneers execute a technique like that which allowed them to zero in on food patches. Scouts comb the landscape for a location which will be safe from predators, will provide protection from blustery winds, and will be near fresh food. Then the surveyors deliver their conclusions. Crowds gather around the several spots in which the advocates of each location are dancing. Hyper-energized acrobats promoting the same destination gradually entice bees away from weaker groups of publicists. Finally, the swarm calculates which homestead is best, then heads out en masse to build a new hive.

Numbers are critical to the execution of this process. Bees cannot hunt for new real-estate-much less carry out the ensuing comparisons-until they reach a minimum of 200.

Ants, whose signs of sociality appear after 80 million b.c., use their networked mind for yet another purpose-warfare. So vital are the coordinating mechanisms which wire a crowd of Formicidae into a thinking machine that the most effective strategy is to attack a population without notice and cause a panic, breaking the bonds which connect the victims. But often, two ant armies meet unexpectedly. The shock scatters each phalanxed legion in a frenzied route. Victory belongs to the group which can reconstitute its links with the greatest speed.

While octopi and fish use collaborative information processing, their networks remain remarkably local. Insects, on the other hand, show signs of developing something old among bacteria but new among eukaryotes-a cosmopolitan web. The most important means of transmission among ants is chemical. A maverick ant, nosing about in unexplored territory, will stumble across food, eat her fill, then head slowly back toward the nest, hugging the ground and extruding her sting. This is not post-meal lethargy. The ant is laying a liquid attractant for her sisters, who cannot resist the compulsion to follow in its wake. If they, too, find that the pickings at trail’s end are good, they will return in the same manner, sprinkling the chemical traces of their jubilation behind them. Thus a widening or waning scent trail encodes data on the richness of a food source, its ease of exploitation, and its gradual depletion. A team of Belgian biologists has called this odor track, which summarizes the experience of hundreds or thousands, a form of collective memory.

Equally important to the ant colony are its alarm sprays-pheromones which alert the legions to danger. Ants are able to read alarm signals sent by other species, thus picking up on the fact that there’s trouble in the neighborhood, and turning nearby colonies into sensory extensions. In turn, they act as sensors for nearby populations of “foreigners.” A patchwork of rival ant cities is thus able to form a primitive internet.

We have now reached a point 1.9 billion years after the emergence of the first eukaryotic cells and 1.4 billion years after the first multicellular film. Those bacteria which were able to absorb internal guest workers have churned out beasts with brains. And now, with learning and new forms of information exchange, multi-cellular animals have begun their advance toward the creation of a whole new kind of global intellect.

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Verlag Heinz Heise

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