As far as I have been able to discover, the first synergic scientist was an Austrian biologist named Paul Kammerer.  He was born in 1881 and died in 1926 at the age of 45 by suicide. By all reports, Kammerer was a remarkable and gifted scientist, but also a very controversial one. His life story forms the basis for the science classic The Case of the Midwife Toad by Arthur Koestler.

Side by side with the causality of classical physics, there exists a second basic principle in Universe which tends towards unity; a force of attraction comparable to universal gravity. But while gravity acts on all mass without discrimination, this other universal force acts selectively to bring like and like together both in space and in time; it correlates by affinity regardless whether the likeness is one of substance, form, function, or refers to symbols.

Elsewhere, General System scientist George Landhas written:

Kammerer originated a concept that can now be seen to be true. Along with the process of entropy there is another process occurring in parallel, that of ‘syntropy’; information constantly produces new combinations, producing diversity and higher levels of organization.

As a matter of fact, the function of entropy is complementary to that of syntropy. Because no organization of information can reach an absolute state, entropy aids our re-organization by breaking down old materials. It is the catabolic function of the physical Universe just as syntropy is anabolic. Life cannot exist without death, for life would have nothing to resynthesize into higher organizations if it were in static equilibrium. As the great biologist Haldane put it, “Normal death must apparently be regarded from the biological standpoint as a means by which room is made for further more definite development of life.” Death contributes to life in a specific causal chain. Decay is the handmaiden of creation.

As an illustration of the radical difference between the entropy of some manifestations of energy and the syntropy of information, consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics as it applies to two bodies of unequal temperatures that are brought together. In time, heat energy will distribute itself evenly between the two bodies, and in contact with a wider environment as well, will continually equalize and redistribute their heat. The order of heat runs ‘downhill’ for organization to chaos. Yet, if we considerinformation as a function of energy, we see the reverse phenomena. The two bodies, rather than diffusing their data, can actually increase their order and organization. Two atoms, two molecules, two cells, or two humans can exchange and share information, and will in time, through evolution, continually organize it into higher levels.

Yet the foundation of physics assumes the verity of the law of Entropy: that the Universe is progressing into disorder. Time and time again experiments have demonstrated the facts of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the facts are true—as far as they go. Unfortunately a great deal of scientific thinking is based on investigation of what we now can only characterize as closed systems, systems isolated from their normal environment. A classical statement is that when a phenomena is ‘left to itself’, this or that will happen. A researcher will do his best to isolate his experiment so that it will not be affected by outside influences or “perturbations”. In doing so he is in fact creating an isolated system, one which has no choice but to behave in an entropic manner as it is removed from the interactive growth with the larger system. Even in our age of sophisticated science this artificial methodology continues—violating the advice given by Max Planck over four decades ago when he said, “The assumption that the orderly course of a process can be represented by an analysis of it into temporal and spacial processes must be dropped. The conception of wholeness must therefore be introduced in physics as in biology.”

Elsewhere on the net, Vidette Todaro-Franceschi writes:

Paul Kammerer studied and classified sequences of repeating events or events that seemed related. In his book Das Gesetz der Serie, Kammerer systematically classifies events that he believed to be somehow related.  For example, in one of his files he notes, two soldiers, both 19 years old, both born in Silesia, both volunteers in the transport corps, both admitted to the same hospital in 1915, both victims of pneumonia, and both named Franz Richter.

He came to the conclusion that there was some kind of acausal connecting or organizing principle and deemed it to be  a case of what he referred to as seriality:   “We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and arrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.”

Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (The Law of the Series) has never been translated into English, but the following exposition was included as an appendix in The Case of the Midwife Toad.

The Law of the Series

Arthur Koestler

Camille Flammarion, the astronomer, tells in his book “L’Inconnu et les Probl‘mes Psychiques” the veridical tale of Monsieur de Fortgibu and the plum pudding. A certain M. Deschamps, when a little boy in OrlÈans, was given by M. de Fortgibu, a visitor to his parents, a piece of plum pudding which made an unforgettable impression on him. As a young man, years later, dining in a Paris restaurant, he saw plum pudding written on the menu and promptly ordered it. But it was too late, the last portion had just been consumed by a gentleman whom the waiter discretely pointed out – M. de Fortgibu, whom Descamps had never seen again since that first meeting. More years passed and M. Deschamps was invited to a dinner party where the hostess had promised to prepare that rare dessert, a plum pudding. At the dinner table M. Deschamps told his little story, remarking, ‘All we need now for perfect contentment is M. de Fortgibu’. At that moment the door opened and a very old, frail and distraught gentlemen entered, bursting into bewildered apologies: M. de Fortgibu had been invited to another dinner party and came to the wrong address.

Flammarion belonged to that secret guild, the collectors of coincidences. Some addicts keep personal logs enriched by newspaper cuttings to prove their point that coincidences ‘have a meaning’; others regard collecting as a vice in which they indulge with guilty knowledge of sinning against the laws of rationality. Kammerer was a collector belonging to the first category; so was C.G. Jung. ‘I have often come up against the phenomena in question’, he wrote, ‘and could convince myself how much these inner experiences meant to my patient. In most cases they were things people do not talk about for fear of exposing themselves to thoughtless ridicule. I was amazed to see how many people have had experiences of this kind and how carefully the secret was guarded.’   

A typical case from Jung’s own collection is the following:

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned around and saw a flying insect knocking against the windowpane outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabacid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetomia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get in a dark room at this particular moment.

Kammerer started his case collection when he was twenty, and kept it up at least until Des Gesetz der Serie was finished in 1919. The book contains – by design or coincidence – exactly one hundred samples. Unlike most collectors with a predilection for dramatic cases, Kammerer’s are nearly drawn from trivial occurrence. The first chapter contains a motley collection of incidents from his notebooks under various headings: numbers, words, names, meeting people, letters, dreams, disasters, and so on. A few examples will illustrate his matter-of-fact, pedestrian approach:

(2a) My brother-in-law, E. van W., attended on November 4, 1910, a concert in the Bˆsendorf Saal (Vienna); He had seat No. 9 and his cloakroom ticket No. 9.

(2b) On November 5, that is the next day, we both attended the concert of the Philharmonic Orchestra in the Musikvereinssaal (Vienna); he had seat No. 21 (given to him by a colleague, Herr R.) and cloakroom ticket No. 21.

Kammerer then comments that examples 2a and 2b have to be classified as ‘a serie of the second order’ because the coinciding numbers of seats and cloakroom tickets recur twice on successive days; ‘we shall soon see that such clusterings of series of the first order into series of the second or nth order are common, almost regular occurences’.

(7) On September 18, 1916, my wife, while waiting for her turn in the consulting rooms of Prof. Dr.J.v.H., reads the Magazine Die Kunst; she is impressed by some reproductions of pictures by a painter named Schwalbach, and would like to see the originals. At that moment the door opens and the receptionist calls out to the patients: ‘Is Frau Schwalbach here? She is wanted on the phone.’

(22) On July 28, 1915, I experienced the following progressive series: (a) my wife was reading about ‘Mrs Rohan’, a character in the novel Michael by Hermann Bang; in the tramway she saw a man who looked like her friend, Prince Josef Rohan; in the evening Prince Rohan dropped in on us. (b) In the tram she overheard somebody asking the pseudo-Rohan whether he knew the village of Weissenbach at Lake Attersee, and whether it would be a pleasant place for a holiday. When she got out of the tram, she went to the delicatessen shop on the Naschmarkt, where the attendant asked her whether she happened to know Weissenbach on Lake Attersee – he had to make a delivery by mail and did not know the correct postal address.

According to popular belief, coincidences tend to come in clusters or series. Gamblers have their lucky days; at other times it is one damn thing after another. The title that Kammerer chose for his book, Dea Gesetz der Serie, is in German almost a clichÈ – the equivalent of ‘it never rains but it pours’. He defines his key concept as follows: ‘A Serie manifests itself as a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things and events – a recurrence, or clustering, in time or space whereby the individual members in the sequence – as far as can be assertained by carefull analysis – are not connected by the same active cause.  

The crucial phrase is ‘lawful recurrence’. Indeed the purpose of Kammerer’s book was to prove that what we traditionally call a coincidence or a series of coincidences is in reality the manifestation of a universal principle in nature which operates independently from the known laws of physical causation. The ‘laws of seriality’ are, on this view, as fundamental as those of physical causality, but hitherto unexplored. Moreover, when Kammerer speaks of ‘individual members of the sequence’ he means that what we regard as isolated coincidences are merely the tips of the iceberg which happen to catch our eye, because we are conditioned, in our traditional modes of thinking, to ignore the ubiquitous manifestations of ‘seriality’, which otherwise, would stare into our faces. In other words, if we were conscious coincidence-collectors, we would soon find ourselves transferred into a serial Wonderland universe.

Thus Kammerer set out to explore the unexplored ‘laws of seriality’. It may have been an eccentric undertaking, but he went about it methodically as a zoologist devoted to taxonomy: he classified coincidences as he had classified the lizards of the Adriatic islands. The first hundred massive pages of the book are devoted to this task. If he was Byron among the toads, one might call him the Linneaus of coincidence. In the opening chapters of the book we get a typology of non-causal occurrence relating to names, numbers, situations, etc., as already mentioned.

This is followed by a chapter on the ‘morphology of series’. We learn to distinguish between series of the first, second etc. power, according to the number of successive ‘similar or identical events’: the ‘Rohan’ case would thus form a series of the third order (three successive occurrence). We may also distinguish series of first, second,etc. power, according to the number of parallel concurrences. Thus the information about Kammerer’s liaison with the dancer Grete Wiesenthal was contained in a letter which Lacerta wrote from Australia dated June 24, 1970: on the same day I received the same information independently from Professor Paul Weiss over dinner; half an hour later, on the same evening, the Austrian television announced that Grete Wiesenthal had died in Vienna, aged eighty-five – which makes this a ‘series of the third power’.

Besides ‘order’ and ‘power’, series can also be classified according of the number of their parameters – that is, the number of shared attributes. Thus, according to Kammerer’s ‘case 45′, during the holiday season of 1906, Baroness Trautenberg, a spinster born in 1846, was injured by a falling tree, and at a different place, Baroness Riegershofen, a spinster born in 1846, was injured by a falling tree. Four parameters: Baroness, spinster, age, tree. A little more spectacular is Kammerer’s case No. 10, concerning two young soldiers who, in 1915, were separately admitted to the military hospital of Katowitze, Bohemia. They had never met before. Both were nineteen, both had pneumonia, both were born in Silesia, both were volunteers in the Transport Corps, and both were called Franz Richter. Six parameters.

After typology and morphology we get also a systematisation of series: homologous and analogous series, pure and hybrid series, inverted series, alternating, cyclic, phasis series. and so on. Kammerer spent hours sitting on benches in various public parks, noting down the number of people that strolled by in both directions, classifying them by sex, age, dress, whether they carried umbrellas or parcels. He did the same on his long tram journeys from suburb to office. Then he analysed his tables and found that on every parameter they showed the typical clustering phenomena familiar to statisticians, gamblers and insurance companies. He made, of course, the necessary allowances for such causal factors as rush-hour, weather, etc.  

The theoretical value of these classificatory efforts is difficult to decide. It is easy to pick holes in the system: how many parameters has Jung’s scarab knocking at the window? The quantitative assessment of similarities of form has always been a stumbling block in problems of this kind. Kammerer was not versed in the more sophisticated developments of the theory of probability. He was, therefore, unable to give a convincing answer to the classic argument of the sceptic that, given sufficient time, the most unlikely combinations are bound to turn up by pure chance – a scarab at the window, or a callosity on the ostrich. But however justified, scepticism may be, this first attempt at a systematic classification of a-causal serial events may perhaps at some future date find unexpected applications.

Einstein, for one, thought highly of Kammerer’s book; called it ‘original and by no means absurd’. Perhaps he remembered that the non-Euclidian geometry’s for multidimensional curved space, which some nineteenth-century mathematicians had invented as a perverse mathematical game, provided the basis for his cosmology.

At the end of the first, classificatory part of Das Gesetz der Series, Kammerer concluded:

So far we have been concerned with the factual manifestations of recurrent series, without attempting an explanation. We have found that the recurrence of identical or similar data in contiguous areas of space and time is a simple empirical fact which has to be accepted and which cannot be explained by coincidences – or rather, which makes coincidences rule to such an extent that the concept of coincidence itself is negated.

He then proceeds to the theoretical part of the book, in which he attempts to give a scientific explanation of the ‘law of seriality’. This theory can be shown tantalising flashes of intuition. It contains some astonishingly crude fallacies in physics, but leaves nevertheless a paradoxical aftertaste of persuasiveness and intellectual beauty, which lingers on. Its effect is comparable to that of the Impressionist paintings, which has to be viewed from a distance; if one puts one’s nose into it, it dissolves into chaotic blobs.

The central idea is that, side by side with causality of classic physics, there exists a second basic principle in the universe which tends towards unity; a force of attraction comparable to universal gravity. But while gravity acts on all mass without discrimination, this other universal force acts selectively to bring like and like together both in space and time; it correlates by affinity, regardless whether the likeness is one of substance, form or function, or refers to symbols. The modus operandi of this force, the way it penetrates the trivia of every day life, Kammerer confesses to be unable to explain because it operates ex hypothesis outside the known laws of causality.

But he points to analogies on various levels, where the same tendency towards unity, symmetry and coherence manifests itself in conveniently causal ways: from gravity and magnetism through chemical affinity, sexual attraction, biological adaptations, symbiosis, protective colouring, imitative behaviour, and so on, up to the curious observation that ageing couples, master and servant, master and dog, tend to grow more and more alike in appearance – as if they were demonstrating that they are well advanced on the road towards the ‘I am thou and thou art I’.

We thus arrive at the image of the world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shuffling and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.

In space the unifying force produces clusters of events related by affinity; in time similarly related series; hence the rather awkward label ‘seriality’, as distinct in causality, which Kammerer chose for his postulated universal principle.

Series in time, i.e. the recurrence of similar events, he interprets as manifestations of periodic or cyclic processes which propagate themselves like waves along the time-axis in the space-time continuum. We are, however, only aware of the crests of the waves; these enter into consciousness and are perceived as isolated coincidences, whereas the troughs remain unnoticed (this, of course, is the exact reversal of the sceptic’s argument that out of the multitude of random events we pick out those few which we consider significant). The waves of recurrent events may be kept in motion either by causal of by a-causal, i.e. ‘serial’ forces.

Examples of the former are the planetary motions, and the periodic cycles derived from them – seasons, tides, night and day. But the recurrent peaks and troughs of promenaders in the park, equipped with umbrellas, and the lucky runs of the gambler, are clearly non-causally related – they are patterns formed according to the autonomous ‘laws of seriality’. Some of these are still completely obscure, others Kammerers considers as tentatively established, devoting a long chapter to theories about significant periods – from the Pythagoreans’ magic seven through Goethe’s ‘circles of good and bad days which revolve inside me’, to Swoboda’s and Fliess’ twenty-three and twenty-seven-day periods. It will be remembered that Freud, too, believed in periodicity and entertained a protracted correspondence with Fliess on how the numbers 23 and 27 must be combined to obtain significant data for individual cycles. (Oddly enough, Kammerer mentions Freud’s name only once, in passing.)

However, Kammerer was too much of an evolutionist to believe in Nietzche’s ‘eternal return’. He realised that his universal tendency towards repetition and symbiotic trend which would account for the emergence of novelty and diversity. The merging of sperm and egg into a single cell is followed by the splitting of the zygote and subsequent differentiation.

The recurrence of a previous event [Kammerer concludes] is also a renewal in the literal sense in so far as it does not merely reproduce the past, but also carries some of the unprecedented with it. It is this blending of the old and the new which conveys the experience of progression in time – which would be lacking if events were to return as identical copies of themselves, like the bands of a clock having completed their circles. Thus the progression of reality should not be compared either to circular or to pendulum motion, but be compared along a three-dimensional spiral . Its turns, repeat themselves and curve always in the same direction, but always at some distance along their axis: returning, yet advancing.

The book ends on a quasi-Messianic note: Kammerer expressing his conviction that the study of seriality will change the destiny of man, for its action ‘is ubiquitous and contiguous in life, nature and cosmos. The law of seriality is the umbilical cord that connects thought, feeling, science and art with the womb of the universe which gave birth to them.  

If Einstein found Kammerer’s idea ‘by no means absurd’, it was perhaps because theoretical physicists in the age of relativity and quantum theory are accustomed to employ as a matter of routine such seemingly absurd concepts as negative mass, ‘holes’ in space, time flowing backwards, waves of probability and subatomic events to which no cause can be assigned.

Another great physicist, Wolfgang Pauli – one of the greatest of our century, he postulated the so-called Pauli Exclusion Principle – the cornerstone of the quantum theory – went one step further, equal in importance to physical reality. The result of Jung’s famous essay, ‘Synchronicity: An A-causal Connecting Principle’, in which he quotes Kammerer at length, pays somewhat grudging tribute to him, and adopts his Law of Seriality – though he gives it a different name. Jung defines ‘Synchronicity’ as the ‘simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events’, or alternatively as a ‘coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning… equal in rank to causality as principle of explanation’.

This is almost verbatim repetition of Kammerer’s definition of ‘Seriality’ as ‘a recurrence of the same or similar things or events in time and space’ – events which, as far as can be ascertained, ‘are not connected by the same acting cause’. The main difference appears to be that Kammerer emphasises Seriality in time (though, of course, he includes contemporaneous coincidences in space), whereas Jung’s concept of Synchronicity seems to refer only to simultaneous events – but he then explains that ‘Synchronicity’ is not the same as ‘synchronous’, but can refer to events at different times. It is psychologically interesting that Jung felt moved to coin a term and then to explain that it does not mean what it means – probably to avoid using Kammerer’s term ‘Seriality’.

Another difference between Kammerer’s book and Jung’s essay is that Jung tries to relate all a-causal phenomena to the collective unconscious and extra sensory perception, whereas Kammerer relies on analogies with physical principles such as gravity, magnetism, etc., rejecting all para-psychological explanations. The most impressive and popular examples of meaningful coincidences are veridical dreams, premonitions, telepathic experiences, and so on. Kammerer believed in Seriality as an irreducible principle of life, dismissed all para-psychological explanations as occult superstition. Nor did he apparently believe in the significance of unconscious processes, either in a Freudian or a ‘serialistic’ context. There are only two dreams mentioned in his collection of coincidences, both trivial and dreamt by others.

The paradox is that he thought of himself as a hard-boiled philosophical materialist. He was also what one may call a devoted atheist; a freemason; a member of the Austrian Socialist Party; and a regular contributor to the Monisticshe Monatshelfe, the monthly published by the German league of Monists. His last article appeared in it posthumously: a description of the Darwin Museum in Moscow.

About Arthur Koestler

At Amazon: The Case of the Midwife Toad

Timothy Wilken’s ORDER (PDF)

This morning we feature part three 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. Reposted from Telepolis.

Networking in Paleontology’s “Dark Ages”

Howard Bloom

In our previous episode, I laid out evidence indicating that the global brain foreseen by computer-futurists already existed 3.5 billion years ago. I attempted to demonstrate how the biology of the primitive cyanobacterium equipped it to act as a component in a parallel-distributed intelligence. The result: a social colony capable of networking data, solving problems, creatively retooling genomes, and of transmitting and receiving genetic upgrades via a worldwide web.

But 3.5 billion years b.c. was long ago. What, if anything, has happened to the global brain since then?

The story is a strange one. Evolution went on to produce life forms with radically new powers. Many of these retained the ability to operate as local networked intelligences. But in the course of their development, an ironic slippage took place. Bacteria and viruses, those stalwart veterans of the days shortly after the earth’s crust first formed, held on to their global research and development system. But “higher” life forms, gifted with capacities whose full potential would ripen only with time, took what seems on the surface to be a large step backward. Yes, they preserved their ability to cluster in social groups and act as communal information processors. But high-speed global data pooling would remain a microbial specialty, one which the “advanced” species would take at least 2.1 billion years to reinvent. This is the next episode in the story of how and why.

Early Networking

The picture of early life is currently in flux, with new discoveries and fresh theories emerging month by month. But despite the shifting collage of guesswork and evidence, two facts stand out:

1) Each find pushes life’s evolution further back in time. In November, 1996, the age of the first cells leaped from 3.5 billion years to 3.85. In the decade from 1986 to 1996, the age of the first nucleated cells bounced from 1.6 to 2.1 billion years.

2) More important, networking, often called synergy, has been a key to evolution since the universe’s first second of existence. Roughly twelve to twenty billion years ago, a submicroscopic pinpoint of false vacuum arose in the nothingness and expanded at a rate beyond human comprehension, doubling every 10-34 seconds. As it whooshed from insignificance to enormity, it cooled, allowing quarks, neutrinos, photons, electrons, then the quark-triumvirates known as protons and neutrons to precipitate from its energy. A neutron is a particle filled with need. It is unable to sustain itself for longer than ten minutes. To survive, it must find at least one mate, then form a family. The initial three minutes of existence were spent in cosmological courting, as protons paired off with neutrons, then rapidly attracted another couple to wed within their embrace, forming the two-proton, two-neutron quartet of a helium nucleus. Those neutrons which managed this match gained relative immortality. Those which stayed single ceased to be. (Roughly twelve billion years later, the universe remains 25% helium.) Protons, on the other hand, seemed able to survive alone. But even they were endowed with inanimate longing. Flitting electrons were overwhelmed by an electrical charge they needed to share. Protons found these elemental sprites irresistible, and more marriages were made. From the mutual needs of electrons and protons came atoms. Atoms with unfinished outer shells bounced around in need of consorts, and found them in equally bereft counterparts whose electron protrusions fit their empty slots (and vice versa). Through these connective compulsions, to paraphrase Yeats, “a terrible beauty was born.”

And so it continued. A physical analogue of unrequited desire was stirred by allures ranging from the strong nuclear force to gravity. These drew molecules into dust, dust into celestial shards, and knitted together asteroids, stars, solar systems, galaxies, and even the mega-matrixes of multi-galactic whorls. Theories like those of Claude Shannon imply that the intertwined elements were bundles of information- skeins of data whose proliferation of plugs and sockets disgorged newnesses at every turn.

One of the products of this inorganic copulation was life. The latest findings suggest that shortly after the molten earth began to harden its shell and massive rains of planetesimals ceased smacking this sphere like a boxer pummeling the face of his opponent, RNA paved the path for DNA. Massive minuets of deoxyribonucleic acid generated the first primitive cells – the prokaryotes – by 3.85 billion b.c. And 350,000 years later, unmistakable signs of complex social life – the multi-million-inhabitant bacterial megalopoli called stromatolites – appeared. Then paleontological dogma has it that virtually nothing of significance occurred until the Cambrian explosion roughly 535 million years ago. One popular science writer, summing up the opinion of the experts, calls this interim “three billion years of non-events” (Karen Wright, “When Life Was Odd,” Discover Magazine, March 1997, p. 53). Oh, there was the occasional burp, say the yawning authorities. But such moments of evolutionary indigestion are hardly worth mentioning.

Confederations of smart molecules

The hints are many that there was little to yawn about. Since software innovations – new forms of behavior and interaction – leave few fossil records, and since paleontologists have been virtually blind to proterozoic social activity, the record seems barren. But evidence indicates that intimate forms of organization were undergoing long and ever more intricate trial periods.

The first cells – the prokaryotes – were highly coordinated confederations of what, for lack of a better term, we would have to call “smart molecules.” Each of these molecular agents was dedicated to a vital function. Some pumped sugars and amino acids, responding to needs in the locations they served. Others reacted to power demand, disassembling molecular fuel to liberate its energy. Still others tuned the chemical balance, assembling proteins, amino acids, nucleotides, vitamins, and fatty acids even a human body cannot make by itself. (We use prokaryotes – bacterial colonies in our guts – to handle some of these manufacturing chores for us). Molecular groupings within the prokaryotic cell sensed food or danger and passed the message along to other molecular squadrons which created movement, allowing their host to pounce or to race away.

This coordinated operation of molecular agents resulted in such prokaryotic beings as bacteria, entities far more flexible than any mere computer net. Bacteria have populated the earth for at least 82% of its existence. Today, they are still going strong. However the fossil record shows new forms of interaction emerging as early as 2.1 billion years ago, when the first macroscopic organism, grypania, makes a hesitant appearance. This hoop-shaped relative of cyanobacteria, the size of a wire wrapped around a penny then let loose, is thought to have been the first eukaryote. If this hypothesis is true, grypania represents not only a major leap in size, but a form of life which thrived on radical breakthroughs in biological intranets.

The Invention of Intranets

Eukaryotic cells were bacteria capable of taking on fellow bacteria as boarders. They made permanent residents of such visitors as mitochondria (proteobacteria-like energy generators), chloroplasts (cyanobacteria-like solar converters which handle photosynthesis), and, most important, spirochetes. Spirochetes – wiry and multi-talented – were commandeered as struts for an intra-cellular skeleton, as contractile fibers for internal transport, as whirling oars for external movement, and as organizers for the reproductive splitting of the eukaryote’s enormous genetic mass. All these former guests were now reproduced along with each replication of the host cell. It was largely this merged approach which, according to biologist Lynn Margulis, allowed life to survive the first toxic pollutant holocaust – the spread in the atmosphere of a gas lethal to previous life, oxygen. For mitochondria gulped oxygen and turned it into fuel. And other members of the new intracellular commune were able to clean up the poisons which oxygen left behind.

As so often happens in examining life, computer metaphors are too limited to describe the result. Even a bacterial colony is a flexible, self-organizing, self-repairing, and self-improving parallel processing device which not only reprograms and computes but acts out its calculations, then responds to the consequences. While a single bacterium is a biochemical net, the eukaryote is the web which emerges when masses of biochemical nets fuse.

At level after level, purposeful assemblies mesh to form a processor/responder which, in turn, becomes a module in the next step up the networking ladder. One of these modules is the gene. Another is the chromosome – a lengthy chain of genes which not only work together, but are welded into a single molecule. (Contrary to the implication of the phrase “the selfish gene,” all genes function in teams. Even the genes of a bacterium are welded in a circular chromosome.)

A prokaryotic bacterium, with its free-floating single ring of DNA, could not accomplish the elaborate form of cell-division known as meiosis, a highly orchestrated process which would eventually make sexual reproduction – a key form of information mixing and matching – possible. This revolution in data-exchange would emerge from a eukaryotic invention – the marshalling of multiple chromosomes into files arrayed within a nucleus. Chromosomes regimented like well-drilled parade teams could mass in genomes literally a thousand times larger in size and infinitely greater in complexity than their predecessors.

Margulis contends that the eukaryote’s tamed spirochetes could not perform the interior superintendence of replication and the exterior job of propulsion simultaneously. Leaving a cell immobilized through its “pregnancy” was a dangerous business. The dividing eukaryote could not aggressively seek food. Nor could it avoid the attacks of predatory fellow-eukaryotes whipping through the water in search of victims. The solution: to concentrate spirochetic propellers on the outside of one cell, then to generate an attached cell whose spirochetes could remain indoors handling reproduction. Thus, according to Margulis’ spirochete hypothesis, the communal gathering within a cell led to another massive leap in the evolution of networks: multicellularity.

Colonies of single-celled organisms could be sieved apart, then if given freedom, were (and still are) able to reconstruct their shattered polis. The multicellular entities which emerged at the end of the paleoproterozoic era had lost that option. In exchange, they had gained the opportunity to perform far grander functions.

The first possible remains to be found so far of multicellular organisms, crudely called carbon films, were probably the leaves and strands of early seaweeds – 1.6 billion year old amalgamations of the prokaryotic algae to whose category cyanobacteria belong. These precocious eukaryotes were, according to some paleontologists, passive multi-cellular sheets which could only wave in the currents or settle on seabed rocks.

But the fossil record hints that a billion years ago, single-celled eukaryotes lifted themselves from the solar submissiveness of plants and showed the aggressive and restless characteristics we associate with animals. The one-celled rovers possessed internal skeletons of former spirochetes, external “shells” called pedicles, and the ability not only to whisk through water but to crawl along thanks to spirochetic microtubules which pulled one shell segment together with another then relaxed the pair again. Helping these protozoans achieve size and new functions were breakthroughs like a system of inner pipes and bladders which collected water and spat it out before an overload could bloat the cellular interior. This bilge-pump anticipated the later invention of the kidney. Another major advance was “development” – the ability to assume a succession of physical forms each dedicated to a different purpose. A protozoan might begin life as a fast moving flagellate, seek out new territory to mine, then settle down to the slow moving but powerful blob of an amoeba – a supreme environmental exploiter. This is the equivalent of being a scout plane early in life and a harvesting machine once a field of grain has been found.

The Advent of the Nervous System

There are tantalizing hints of innumerable as-yet-undiscovered steps in another key networking technology – the advent of a nervous system. 3.5 billion year old cyanobacteria were already capable of transmitting data from sensory molecules within the cell to molecular motion-makers, allowing a bacterium to scoot from trouble and zip toward opportunity. Cyanobacteria in colonies evolved the ability to broadcast data using chemical transmissions and genetic bits which travelled like messages in a bottle through the community and beyond.

But the eukaryote – an assembly of formerly independent beings which must live and die in unison – is a far larger and more intricate beast. Its equipment for internal communication includes the cytoskeleton – a tubular matrix alive to the nature of its surroundings. The cytoskeleton is such an agile coordinator that some audacious theorists have called it a cellular “brain.” Interior data traffic is also aided by “second messengers” like cyclic AMP, which collects bulletins arriving at the ports of the outer membrane and rushes them to their targets, readjusting the operation of membrane channels, turning on energy-producing mechanisms, activating specific enzymes, and even changing the cell’s speed and direction – literally altering its mission. Cyclic AMP’s travels are notable not only for the accuracy of their routing but for the cluttered distances they cover. The average eukaryote is ten times the size of a prokaryote – and some eukaryotes are many thousands of times that of their cellular predecessors. Rapid detection by the membrane and the equally swift reactions made possible by second messengers proved extremely necessary.

Protozoans are endangered by fast-moving cousins, the carnivores of their world. Some eukaryotic hunters are equipped with poison launchers (toxicysts) on their exterior along with the flagella and cilia needed for brisk movement. A protozoan on the prowl needs to coordinate a host of spirochetic whips and propulsive whiskers (cilia) to produce precision movement. Its potential prey, provided with similar propulsion devices, has to be equally exact in marshalling its organs for evasion.

But more indicates that the prototype of a nervous system was in the making. The primary sensory ability of a prokaryote like a bacterium seems to have come from its ability to detect chemical gradients – flows whose growing weakness or strength allowed the bacterium to determine whether it was swimming toward or away from a chemical beacon’s source. Single-celled eukaryotes moved a giant step further, developing specialized sentinels. One example is the eyespot of the Euglena. Some Euglena use this photoreceptor in tandem with another light-detecting speck on one of the flagella near their mouths, thus evolving an early forerunner of stereoscopic vision – dual-organ phototaxis.

Each bacterium had carried its own microprocessor – its single chromosome. A bacterial colony networked these isolated calculators into an awesome creative brain. But once again eukaryotic animals leaped ahead. They went from a single internal processing, programming and reengineering unit per cell to a tightly knit machine of many bound together in the nucleus. To generate additional information processing power, some cells had two or more of these multi-tiered thinking centers. A standard arrangement was to allocate the task of reproduction to a micronucleus and move the job of controlling daily cell life to a macronucleus up to forty times larger in size. Two proto-brains for the price of one.

What’s more, single-celled eukaryotic protozoa, like their bacterial predecessors, were highly social beings. Extrapolating backwards from their behavior today, we can infer some of the resulting benefits. The 65,536 semi-independent cells in a Volvox took a major step toward a hitherto unknown pleasure – sexual reproduction. Gathered in a pinpoint-sized (1 mm.) hollow ball, the colony members divided into two different forms. One group concentrated on composing the cooperative’s balloon-like body. The other, located prophetically in the posterior, focused on reproduction. Thus began the differentiation between somatic and germ cells which would be critical to the development of “higher” organisms. Volvox were apparently not content with one proto-sexual invention. They also were among the first forms to generate male and female colonies.

Prokaryotic myxobacteria form a “fruiting body” when they congregate – however it is so small that it must be magnified roughly 200 times before its details become clear. The height the tree-like structure can provide as a takeoff point for its spores is minuscule. However eukaryotic amoebas can join together in a giant cell roughly a foot (30 centimeters) across. That blob, called a plasmodium, holds within it literally billions of nuclei, and is able to undergo either sexual reproduction or to take another route and become a fruiting body immensely loftier than that of its bacterial counterpart. Should it “choose” sexuality, the plasmodium is able to complete a host of radically new processes which, in more advanced beings, would allow for the creation of an embryo. This has led some scientists to conclude that plasmodial slime molds – as these colonies of talented eukaryotic amoeba are called – may be a missing link between single-celled animals and such multi-celled beasts as you and me.

The jump in information exchange between eukaryotes showed yet another step toward the development of a nervous system. Several forms of cilia-powered protozoans (Carchesium and Zoothamnium) produced a second generation which, unlike their unicellular parents, did not totally wall themselves off at birth. Their direct connection to each other allowed one cell to sense an obstacle or an opening and to flash the data so fast that the multitude could react almost instantly and in total coordination. The “wiring” between cells prefigured neural components. Both were remodeled spirochetic microtubules, and both shared roughly 100 signal-transmission proteins The odds are good, then, that in the 2 billion years now blank to us, numerous further elements of primal nervous systems were developed through trial, error and occasional purposeful invention. (See my previous article for evidence of purposeful invention among the earliest bacteria.)

These evolutionary achievements were incremental steps toward multi-cellularity. And as Wurzburg University biologist Helmut Sauer puts it, “Once multicellularity is established, all kinds of fungi, plants, and animals can evolve….”

Agglomeration of Machines within Machines

True to Dr. Sauer’s words, 1.4 billion years after the new eukaryotic refinements had begun, the first truly exotic multicellular beings appeared. One recently discovered fossil clam dates to over 720 million years ago. The clam was a terra-flop ahead of anything seen before, dwarfing interlaced protozoans in size, complexity, and internal wiring. It possessed two hinged shells operated by a pair of powerful muscles capable of opening with exquisite control and clamping shut with massive power; a tongue-like foot of muscle able to dig a hiding hole in the sea bottom; a tube to penetrate above the marine floor and siphon oxygen-and-food-rich water below the surface when the being buried itself; and a filter-system of cilia through which the clam could pump the liquid it had sucked, and with which it could then sift out protozoans and other edibles, passing them via mucous carrier to the mouth. The early mollusk even possessed a heart with three chambers. All of this had to be wired to a host of sensors and a nervous system whose central direction was handled by three processing clusters (ganglia). Without exquisite synergy, these separate components would have been useless. When networked, they constituted something truly unprecedented: an immense and purposeful union of interacting parts – a nearly infinite agglomeration of machines within machines.

The era of this bivalve’s birth was dominated by strange and as-yet-little understood creatures – the Ediacarans. These wildly varied higher life forms were apparently soft-bodied beasts living near the ocean’s surface or crawling on its bottom. The complex multi-legged physiology of some indicates advanced data transmission between the billions of cells which made up each creature. Alas, the Ediacarans’ full story and any hints it may carry regarding their mechanisms for information exchange is still shrouded in ignorance.

Yet we do have unmistakable indications that sociality continued. Trilobites dominated the period from 600 million to 500 million years ago. These armored sea scourers had not only heads, eyes, sensory antenna, and all the indications of a nervous system centralized in a brain, but their fossils tend to be found in groups. Some paleontologists, extrapolating backwards from the behavior of such trilobitic living relatives as horseshoe crabs, suspect that the armored ancients gathered for mating orgies in which they shed their shells for maximal body contact. Trilobite-specialist Kevin Brett cites evidence that males may have been larger than females (or vice versa), and that many trilobites were, in his words, “quite ornate.” From that and the positioning of trilobites in fossil beds, he proposes the sexual festivities may not have been entirely promiscuous. Modern “toads,” he points out, “will mate with just about anything – so they don’t necessarily recognize members of even their own species.” Brett suspects that trilobites were a bit more discerning.

Noted invertebrate zoologist K.B. Clark theorizes that the foot-and-a-half long (.5 meter), torpedo-shaped Anomalocaris canadensi swam in feeding herds. “The largest animals in most ecosystems are typically herding herbivores,” he notes, “and I see nothing about Anomalocaris that precludes this.” However Dr. Clark admits that science has neglected the study of the fossil indicators which could reveal further details of Cambrian social life.

One thing seems certain: a huge step forward was also an enormous step back. As Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan point out in their brilliant book Microcosmos, multi-celled organisms lost the rapid-fire external information exchange, extemporaneous inventiveness and the global data-sharing of bacteria, which continued living side by side with macrobeasts as both helpers and adversaries. Physicist-turned-microbiologist Eshel Ben Jacob argues that multi-celled eukaryotes did at least continue to exchange and reengineer genes, maintaining local versions of what he calls “creative webs.” Communicating over small distances, however, the metazoans made awesome contributions to the elaboration of intranetting.

Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of self-organizing systems, has observed that a breakdown of progress is frequently an illusion. Under the shattered fragments new structures and processes ferment. And from those innovations come fresh orders whose wonders seem without number. The new organisms had vastly increased their capacities as individual information processors. If these advanced modules could be linked worldwide, the nature of the game would change for good.

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

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

Yesterday, we started a series of excerpts from an important book by Howard Bloom. Reposted from Telepolis.

Creative Nets in the Precambrian Age

Howard Bloom

My sixteen years of interdisciplinary work seem to demonstrate something very different. Yes, the computerized linking of individual minds is likely to bring considerable change. But a worldwide neocortex is not a gift of the silicon age. It is a phase in the ongoing evolution of a networked intelligence which has existed for a very long time. And it is neither uniquely human nor a product of technology. Nature has been far more clever at connectionism than we have. Her mechanisms for information swapping, distributed data processing, and collective creation are more intricate and agile than anything the finest computer theoreticians have yet devised.

The first shock to the theorists of electronically-networked intelligence might well be the biotic counterpart’s age. Gravity pulled this earth together 4.7 billion years ago. A mere 500,000 years after the new sphere’s crust had stabilized, the powers of chemical attraction yanked together the first detectable life. And a geological wink after that – in roughly 3.5 billion b.c.- the first communal “brains” were already making indelible marks upon the face of the waters. Those marks are called stromatolites – mineral deposits ranging from a mere centimeter across to the size of a man, and even to the vastness of a reef. Stromatolites were manufactured by cooperating protist colonies with more microorganisms per megalopolis than the human population of Mexico City. These prokaryotic communities throve in the shallows of tropical lakes and of the ocean’s intertidal pools.

	prokaryotic microorganism

The rocky deposits ancient stromatolites have left behind were created by legions of cyanobacteria, organisms so internally crude that they had not yet gathered their DNA into a nucleus. But in their first eons of existence, these primitive cells had already mastered one of the primary tricks of society: the division of labor. Some colony members specialized in photosynthesis, storing the energy of sunlight in the ornately complex molecules of ATP. The sun-powered assemblers took in nutrients from their surroundings and deposited the unusable residue in potentially poisonous wastes. Their vastly different bacterial sisters, on the other hand, feasted on the toxic garbage which could have killed their photosynthetic siblings.

stromatolite

The mass of these interdependent beings were held together by an overarching shelter of their own construction. A mini-lasagna of interlayered cyanobacteria would begin a circular settlement. The waters within which the homestead was established would wash a layer of clay and soil over the nascent encampment. Some of the bacteria would send out filaments to bind these carbonate sediments in place. Tier by tier, the colony would create its infrastructure, an undulose or dome-like edifice which could easily become as large compared to the workers who had crafted it as Australia would be to a solitary child with pail and sand shovel.

Many stromatolites carry a peculiar clue whose meaning has gone overlooked. Their fossilized remains spread from a common center in ripples – a pattern extremely familiar to the handful of scientists studying a previously unsuspected bacterial property – social intelligence.

THE NETWORKED BACTERIAL

Eshel Ben Jacob, at the University of Tel Aviv, and James Shapiro at the University of Chicago have been studying bacterial colonies from a radically original perspective – and have emerged with surprising results. Their findings explain why the ripple effect is a mark of bacterial networking – and of much, much more.

stromatolite

For generations bacteria have been thought of as lone cells, each making its own way in the world. Ben Jacob and Shapiro, on the other hand, have demonstrated that few, if any, bacteria are hermits. They are extremely social beasts. And undeveloped as their cellular structure might be, their social structure is a wonder. The ripple effect is one manifestation of a colony’s coordinated tactics for mastering its environment. We could call it the probe and feast approach.

A bacterial spore lands on an area rich in food. Using the nutrients into which it has fallen, it reproduces at a dizzying rate. But eventually the initial food patch which gave it its start runs out. Stricken by famine, the individual bacteria, which by now may number in the millions, do not, like the citizens of Athens during the plague of 430 b.c., die off where they lie. Instead these prokaryotes embark on a joint effort aimed at keeping the colony alive.

The initial progeny of the first spore were sedentary. Being rooted to one spot made sense when that microbit of territory was overflowing with edibles. Now the immobile form these first bacteria assumed is no longer a wise idea. Numerous cells switch gears. Rather than reproducing couch potatoes like themselves, they marshall their remaining resources to produce daughters of an entirely different kind – rambunctious rovers built for movement. Unlike their parents, members of the new generation sport an array of external whips with which they can snake their way across a hard surface or twirl through water. This cohort departs en masse to seek its fortune, expanding ring-like from the base established by its ancestors. The travels of the fortunate lead to yet more food.

 Eshel Ben-Jacob

Successful foragers undergo another mass shift. They give birth to daughters as determined to stick to one spot as their grandparents had once been. These stay-at-homes sup on the banquet provided by their new surroundings. Eventually their perch, too, is sucked dry. They then follow bacterial tradition, generating a new swarm of outbound pioneers. Each succession of emigrants leaves behind a circle thinned by its spreading search. And each generation of settlers accumulates in a thick band as it sucks nourishment from its locale. The ripples of ancient stromatolites are proof positive that life three and a half billion years ago already took advantage of social cooperation.

The work of Ben Jacob and Shapiro has demonstrated that bacterial communities are elaborately interwoven by communication links. Their signalling devices are many: chemical outpourings with which one group transmits its findings to all in its vicinity; fragments of genetic material, each of which spreads a different story from one end of the population to another. And a variety of other devices for long-distance data transmission.

These turn a colony into a collective processor for sensing danger, for feeling out the environment, and for undergoing – if necessary – radical adaptations to survive and prosper, no matter how tough the challenge. The resulting modular learning machine is so ingenious that Eshel Ben Jacob has called it a “creative net.”

Take, for example, a process which may have led to the fossilized stromatolites that snake like epileptically misshapen sausages over a distance of two meters or more. All bacterial colonies do not use the round ripple strategy to explore and exploit. Some, like aquatic myxobacteria – gang-hunters which pursue prey ranging from fellow microorganisms to fish – will stretch and twist until they catch the chemical scent of a victim. But to understand the internal workings of one of these writhing cooperatives, it is wise to peer over Eshel Ben Jacob’s shoulder as he carries on his seven-year study of bacillus and discovers how individual bacteria are “pre-wired” to be components of a larger information processing machine.

When famine strikes, some bands of bacterial outriders blaze a long trail which leads to territory as barren as that from which they have fled. But they do not suffer their fate in silence. For they are the sensory tentacles with which the larger group feels out its landscape. As such, they must communicate their findings. To do so, they broadcast a chemical message: “avoid me.” Other exploring groups heed the warning and shun their sisters stranded in the desert. By releasing chemotactic repulsers, the failed scouts have sealed their fate. They will die in the Sahara into which they’ve wandered – unaided and alone. But their suicide has served the collective information-gathering process – adding survey reports to an expanding knowledge-base about the surrounding terrain.

Other bacterial cells encounter turbulent conditions which destroy them before they can transmit their chemical evaluations. But they, too, manage to ship back information about their findings. For the fragments of their shredded genomes filter through the colony, carrying a message of danger. Then there are the voyagers whose trek takes them to a new promised land. These send out a chemical bulletin of an entirely different kind. Loosely translated, it means, “Eureka, we’ve found it. Join us as quickly as you can.”

In all this, the bacterial colony is displaying the classical characteristics of a complex adaptive system – a collaborative learning device. As John Holland, an early pioneer of complex adaptive systems studies, puts it, the “behavior of a diverse array of agents” when merged results in “aggregate capabilities” far beyond those of any individual. These are the powers of a massively parallel distributed system – another example of which is the modern supercomputer.

But Ben Jacob’s studies suggest that the bacterial colonies of 3.5 billion years ago had taken giant strides beyond any computer man has yet built. For the informationally-linked microorganisms under Ben Jacob’s microscope demonstrate a skill exceeding the capacities of any device from Cray Research or Fujitsu. Working as a group, bacteria possess a transformative knack long thought impossible. Not a random process like mutation, but a goal-driven, “teleonomic” talent. They are capable of acting as their own genetic engineers. In fact, they utilize the same tools as modern science’s genetic tinkerers: plasmids, vectors, phages, and transposons. Should the colony’s strategy of group hunt and peck prove useless, the messages sent back to the center do not unleash new waves of migrants. They become the raw data for genetic research and development.

Ben Jacob was curious to determine just how inventive the genomic-resculpting process could be. Did bacteria with their backs to the wall merely plug in prefabricated twists of DNA and revert to ancestral strategies? Or could they create solutions which were entirely new? The Israeli physicist-turned-microbiologist explains how he administered microbial ingenuity tests.

---

We tried exposing bacterial colonies to conditions so novel that the creatures could never have encountered them before. Tough conditions, conditions of life and death. We wanted to know how inventive they could be in reworking their genetic code. For example, we took bacteria that can’t move on agar but are able to roam freely in liquid. We put them on the wilderness of their worst nightmares, agar, and deprived them of food. The need to branch out in search of grazing land was a true creative challenge.

Ben Jacob

By forming a modular network beyond the supercomputer and retooling the very genome at their heart, the massed experimentation teams were able to solve the problem. So the networked minds of computer visionaries’ dreams replicate one of the most ancient life strategies on this earthly sphere.

COMMUNICATION LINKS

Beyond mere networking lies another futuristic vision – that of the global brain. Here, too, the microbe has by far outdistanced humankind. Bacteria and their frequent enemies, the viruses, have long since mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. Both swap snippets of genetic material like humans trading how-to books. This system of molecular gossip allows microorganisms to telegraph an improvement from continent to continent. And the nature and speed of communication can be awesome. Let’s take some modern examples. Viruses are such effective collectors of genetic parings that they’ve been known to clip and paste molecular material from whales to sea gulls, from monkeys to cats, and in the lab can transfer firefly genes into the cellular control panel of tobacco leaves, inspiring shaggy greenery to glow in the dark. Bacteria also benefit from this worldwide system of genetic mix and match.

In modern times, members of the microbial sisterhood have demonstrated the power of their information splicing. During the 1980s, newborns in modern hospitals unexpectedly died of pneumonia. Adults recovering from surgery came down with mysterious infections. The problem was not limited to one small spot. Patients in Germany, France, the United States, and Japan were besieged by new forms of bacterial attack. Most baffling of all was the fact that the bacteria pulling off these surprise assaults seemed capable of developing resistance to half a dozen antibiotics nearly overnight. A clinic in Tokyo would report that bacteria had suddenly shown an ability to storm the defenses erected by the formerly impregnable drug streptomycin. At almost the same time, a hospital in San Francisco would announce that the bacteria in its corridors seemed to have mastered the same dismaying trick.

The genetic equivalent of data-base sharing had allowed viruses and bacteria to outrace scientists networked by telephones, computers, international conferences and journal articles. And the new techniques the global microbial brain concocted were devilishly clever. For example, beta-lactam disrupts the construction of the bacteria’s outer wall. Once pharmaceutical companies had perfected beta-lactam-producing antibiotics, they regularly changed their discoveries’ composition to overcome bacterial evolution. The race between researchers and their microbial adversaries began in 1942. Scientists were in the lead for decades. Then the bacteria finally outpaced the researchers.

The beta-lactam antibiotic functioned by destroying a bacterial enzyme called beta-lactamase. Infectious bacteria countered by borrowing the instructions for impervious forms of beta-lactamase from non-infectious strains or by developing impregnable new varieties of their own.

Tetracycline, another formerly sure-fire disease killer, had been a drug of choice in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. But by the ’90s tetracycline was almost entirely ineffective. This antibiotic did its trick by sabotaging bacteria’s pivotal protein synthesizers. The bacteria countered by developing a pump that literally spat the antibiotic out.

Today’s microorganisms can move so quickly because they piggyback on two advantages their primordial relatives did not have – the ability to snatch useful genetic twists from millions of different species; and the helpfulness of high speed aircraft in transporting innovations from one population center to another.

But do not underestimate the potential reach of the microbial net in pre-Cambrian times. The odds are good that the earliest microorganisms rode planet-sweeping currents of wind and water. And scientists have already discovered eleven different bacterial types whose age seems to go back well over three billion years. Given the newness of these findings, this eleven are likely to be revealed in the next decade as the merest sliver of proto-biotic life’s diversity. In all probability, then, the microbial global brain – gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants from which to pluck fresh secrets, and the ability to reinvent the genome itself – came into existence some 3.5 billion years before the birth of the Internet.

Ironically, future multi-cellular forms would come to land and sea with a plethora of new capabilities. Their microbial neighbors would continue to use the global brain. But despite the fact that networked intelligence would remain a key to the more “advanced” species’ survival, it would take roughly 1.5 billion years of trial and error before the global brain would rise among the “higher animals”… along with the early spread of tools of stone.

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

At Amazon: Howard Bloom’s The Global Brain

The following is an excerpt from an important book by Howard Bloom. It is reposted from Telepolis.

Biology, Evolution and the Global Brain

Howard Bloom

A past issue of Telepolis carried a chapter from Peter Russell’s book, The Global Brain Awakens. In this excerpt, Russell predicted the coming of a worldwide intelligence networked by computer web.

It might come as a surprise to the British computer scientist, experimental biologist, and physicist to discover that the researchers and theoreticians who specialize in evolution would sneer at the fundamental assumptions underlying this vision. The reason for the evolutionary community’s contempt? A concept called individual selection. An idea which has provided powerful new ways of looking at human behavior since it was first codified roughly 30 years ago. But a concept which since then has partially degenerated from an intellectual lens to a set of blinders.

This article will expose the shaky roots of individual selectionism. And it will summarize one model- my own- which could provide a missing bridge between the skeptics – evolutionary scientists – and the believers-computer specialists who envision a planet pulsating with shared information. A planet, as Russell puts it, which has grown a global nervous system.

The scientific credentials of those who predict a worldwide intelligence are impeccable. Peter Russell studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge, worked with Stephen Hawking, obtained a post-graduate degree (once again at Cambridge) in experimental psychology, and also has a degree in experimental psychology. Joel de Rosnay, author of the 1986 book Le Cerveau PlanÈtaire (The Planetary Brain), has been Director of Research Applications at the Pasteur Institute, a research associate in biology and computer graphics at MIT, and was instrumental in the creation of France’s Center for the Study of Systems and Advanced Technologies. Valentin Turchin, a key member of the international “Global Brain Study Group,” holds three degrees in theoretical physics. Gottfried Mayer-Kress, author of The Emergence of Global Brains in Cyber Space, holds a doctorate in theoretical physics from The University of Stuttgart and has been associated with such prestige institutions as CERN, Los Alamos National Lab, and the Santa Fe Institute. Francis Heylighen, another catalytic member of the “Global Brain Study Group,” possesses a doctorate in physics from the University of Brussels and is, among other things, associate director of Brussels’ multi-disciplinary Center Leo Apostel.

Why, then, would an international fellowship of equally august specialists be likely to deride as naive pseudo-science the notion of superorganismic intelligence?

The individual selectionists who dominate today’s “Neo-Darwinism” believe that all human and animal behavior is the result of genetic avariciousness. Even the most seemingly self-sacrificial deed is the result of a hidden calculation of genetic costs and benefits. A gene sufficiently greedy to guarantee that two copies of itself make it into the next generation will rapidly expand its numbers. Genes which program for self-denial will give up resources to help others. As a consequence, some of these group players will launch no copies of themselves. The population of unselfish genes will dwindle generation after generation until the contributors to the larger good have philanthropized themselves out of existence. And the long-term survivors will be pre-programmed to commit an act of cooperation only if the price of what they are forced to relinquish pays off in a genetic profit.

Meanwhile, another school of evolutionary thought has been driven underground. It is known as group selectionism. Those few evolutionary scientists willing to admit to their belief in group selection aver that individuals will sacrifice their unique genetic legacy in the interests of a larger whole. Such a need to cooperate and converge would be necessary to make the global brain and the planetary nervous system possible. On the other hand, if the individual selectionists prove correct, humans will be unwilling to share knowledge which might give others an edge. The cyber-ocean of the worldwide web and its technological successors will be a barracuda pit rather than a meta-intellect.

Numerous academics in journals which shun emotionally biased language have labeled group selectionism “a heresy.” Robert Wright, the chronicler of individual-selectionist evolutionary psychology, is more gentle in his condemnation. Group selectionism, he says, is simply a seductive “temptation.”

Robert Wright calls individual selectionist psychology “the new paradigm.” But the concept of individual selection is showing the rigidity of age. The view that all behavior is ultimately based on self-interest began its climb early in the 20th century. Cloaked as “the survival instinct,” it dominated another questionable orthodoxy-the fight or flight syndrome hinted at by William McDougall in 1908 and popularized by Walter Cannon in 1929. As research psychologist Robert E. Thayer says, “certain aspects of the fight or flight response were never supported by scientific evidence.” What’s more, the fight or flight model can be only partially correct. Creatures confronted with an overwhelming threat are frequently immobilized by anxiety, resignation and a variety of related physiological mechanisms. In other words, instead of battling or running to save their lives, they leave themselves open to the jaws of the predator. So much for the ubiquity of the survival instinct! Yet fight-or-flight remains gospel to this day. Over thirty years after Cannon, however, W.D. Hamilton and others had the courage to face at least one small fly in the self-interest ointment. If individual survival is the be all and end all of existence, how could one account for altruism?

During the early ’60s, Hamilton focussed on the selfless manner in which female worker bees sacrifice their reproductive rights and chastely serve their queen. His triumph was a mathematical demonstration that the workers were carrying essentially the same genes as their queen. Hence when an individual lived out her life on behalf of her monarch, she only appeared to be ignoring her own needs. By pampering the colony’s egg-layer, each worker was coddling replicas of her own biological heritage. Altruism, asserted Hamilton, was genetic self-interest in disguise.

Hamilton’s ideas and those built upon them have contributed mightily to our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in fields from medicine, ecology, and psychology to ethology-the study of animals in the wild. But roughly 25 years after the Hamiltonian epiphany, examination of real world bee colonies demonstrated that William Hamilton’s mathematics did not correspond with fact. There was far more genetic variety in societies of unselfish insects than the equations would allow. Individuals were not abjuring their interests simply to protect near-clones of their own genomic material. Apparently something else was going on.

Nonetheless, concepts based on what became known as individual selection hardened into dogma. And many of those tempted to posit non-Hamiltonian approaches have been stopped by the quiet threat of exclusion from professional respectability, of expulsion from career advancement, and of prohibition from the achievement of academic tenure.

In the mid-90s a growing group of scientists have risked ridicule by arguing for the simultaneous validity of group and individual selection. State University of New York evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, who has produced papers championing group selection for over 25 years, is this band’s acknowledged pioneer. I have been the organizer of one of its guerrilla brigades – “The Group Selection Squad.” And my theoretical work indicates strongly that the social and biological sciences may benefit enormously from a selectionist reappraisal.

David Sloan Wilson has pointed to over 400 studies which support the group selectionist point of view. He has concentrated his attention on research indicating that among humans, those who pool their reasoning usually make far better decisions than those who keep their thoughts to themselves. I’ve focussed my efforts elsewhere, introducing to the debate a scientific discipline whose data individual selectionists refuse to take into consideration. This obdurately-overlooked field is psychoneuroimmunology – the study of the interplay between physiology and conditions in the “mental” or psycho-social environment.

As we’ve already seen, individual selectionists insist that a creature-be he man or beast-will only sacrifice his comfort if the payback to his genes is greater than what he gives up. His self-abnegatory behavior must benefit close relatives, the carriers of genes like his own. This is called “kin selection.” A living thing can give up an aspect of its welfare on behalf of a non-relative…but only if it has reason to expect that this favor will be returned. This theoretical loophole is known as “reciprocal altruism.”

Yet as long ago as the early 1940s, researchers like Rene Spitz were already discovering that among humans the genetic survival instinct had a counterpart of an unexpected nature. It was a physiological twin of Freud’s supposed Thanatos, the death wish. The new empiricists lacked Freud’s genius for coining catchwords. They merely noted what occurred and came up with separate labels (“anaclitic shock,” “learned helplessness”) for each instance they identified. In my book The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history, I’ve taken the liberty of introducing a blanket designation. Each investigator from Spitz to Harry Harlow to Lydia Temoshok to Martin Seligman and Robert Sapolsky has unearthed an example of a “self-destruct mechanism.”

Let’s take a typical example. Numerous investigations performed by scientists of widely varying points of view have revealed that the hospital patients who need help the most-those submerged in depression-are the least likely to receive aid. At first glance, it appears to be their own fault. Depressed patients behave in a manner which makes doctors and nurses avoid them. They become incommunicative and irritable. They upset others through every means from facial expression and verbal intonation to body language. An individual selectionist would explain that such self-damaging behavior must be the result of an adaptive response-one which relieves close relatives of a burden or confers upon them a benefit (“kin selection”) or one which stores up the good-will of someone who will compensate the self-victimizing individual or other carriers of his genes in the future (“reciprocal altruism”).

However empirical studies show the opposite. The patients with the greatest number of relatives and friends are the least likely to be depressed. Instead they tend to be the cheerful souls who, even in the face of death, remain charming and bring doctors and nurses flocking sympathetically to their bedside. So those who according to the individual selectionists could benefit replicas of their genes through their demise are the least likely to be stricken prematurely by the axe of death.

On the other hand, both animal and human studies demonstrate that depressed beings flirting with the grim reaper are those the individual selectionists would least expect-those least likely to benefit genes similar to their own. Their family ties are either malformed or non-existent. The immune systems of creatures with few or no friends and intimate kin shut down, while the immunological resistance of those who are part of a social web remain far more vigorous. In other words, isolated individuals undergo a strictly involuntary surrender to disease and bodily dissolution. They are seized by something akin to the suicide mechanism called apoptosis, a sequence of self-destruct events pre-programmed into nearly every living cell and activated when the cell receives signals that it is no longer of use to the larger community of which it is a part. Between their self-crippling immune-systems and their self-defeating conduct, isolated individuals vastly increase their odds of death. The payoff to copies of their genes is likely to be zero. None of this squares with the elaborate dogma of individual selectionism.

When caught in a bind, individual selectionists frequently claim that we are witnessing an instinct which was helpful during our days in hunter-gatherer tribes-an instinct which, under Pleistocene conditions, genuinely did enhance the survival chances of those with similar genes. However, these apologists proclaim, what benefitted the genes at our core in the days of the first stone axe has been perverted in its purpose by modern industrial civilization.

This argument is unlikely to hold water. The isolation of chimps, dogs, laboratory mice, and a wide variety of other animals leads to depression, a down-shifting of the immune system, and a failure to either see or use avenues of escape. Like us, creatures without industrialism dramatically increase their odds of death when they are severed from their social bonds, not when their disappearance stands to benefit the carriers of genes like their own.

This is where the new model of the evolutionary process I’ve introduced in The Lucifer Principle and will elaborate further in an upcoming volume called The Irrational Invention Machine may come in handy. Let us suppose for a moment that group selectionists are correct. Individuals will sacrifice themselves for the good of a larger whole. Those larger wholes compete. When groups struggle, the ones which boast the most effective organizational, strategic and technical advantages win. Individuals who contribute to their group’s virtuosity will be part of the team which survives. And in this manner does evolution proceed.

Now let’s add to the group selectionist claims another concept-one familiar to the mathematicians of complexity. Complex adaptive systems are learning machines made up of numerous components. Neural nets and immune systems are particularly good examples. Both apply an algorithm best expressed non-mathematically by Jesus of Nazareth: “To him who hath it shall be given; from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away.”

The neural net has an extensive population of individual switch points-electronic nodes whose connection to the larger grid can be increased or radically diminished. An immune system takes the principle a step further. It has between ten million and ten billion different antibody types alone. In addition it possesses a flood of entities known as “individual virus-specific T cells.” Both the immune system and the neural net follow the Biblical precept. Elements which contribute successfully to the solution of a communal problem receive resources and influence. But deprivation is the lot of those elements unable to assist the group. In the immune system, T cells encounter the MHC insignia of an invader. A small proportion of the would-be defenders discover that their unique receptors allow them to help defeat the attackers. These champions are allowed to reproduce with explosive speed, and are given the raw material they need to increase their numbers. T-cells of no use in confronting the current assault are robbed of food, of the ability to procreate, and often of life itself. Each is subject to destruction from within via the “pre-programmed cell death” of apoptosis.

In the neural net, nodes whose collaboration contributes to the solution of a problem are rewarded with more electrical energy and with connections to a far flung skein of recruits. The nodes whose efforts prove irrelevant to the problem at hand are fed less electrical juice, and their ability to connect with and arouse others is dramatically decreased. Both T cells and network nodes compete for the right to commandeer the resources of the larger system. And both show a seeming “willingness” to abide by the rules which dictate denial. This combination of competition and selflessness turns an agglomeration of electronic or biological components into a learning machine whose totality possesses an adaptive power vastly beyond that of any single element within it.

The same modus operandi is built into the biological fabric of most social beings. Look, for example, at evidence from the phenomenon which its discoverers call “learned helplessness.” Animals and humans able to solve a repeated problem remain vigorous. But mice, monkeys, dogs and people who cannot get a handle on recurrent misfortune become victims of the self-destruct mechanisms mentioned above. Let’s be more specific. Experiments on the physiological impact of mastering a problem began in the 1950s, when Joseph Brady and his colleagues devised a cruel but clever mechanism. They placed two small chairs side by side. The chairs were wired into an electrical circuit which would deliver simultaneous shocks of identical voltage to each of the contraptions’ loungers. The experimental subjects destined to be strapped into these hot seats would be monkeys. Only one thing made the monkey on the left different from that on the right. The right-hand monkey was given a button with which he could solve the pair’s joint dilemma. With it, he could turn each shock off when it arrived. Investigators assumed that the primate with the switch would develop severe health problems. He was the “executive monkey,” the one of the pair weighed down with responsibility. The beast sitting next to him was relieved of his pain at the same instant. But this free-rider had to exercise no judgement or effort. Surely the creature without the switch would thrive more readily, unencumbered by the double burden of distress and vigilance. Indeed, early analyses seemed to demonstrate that this assumption had been correct. The monkeys with the ordeal of decision making were declared to have a far greater tendency to develop ulcers.

But later inquiry showed that the executive monkey experiments had fatal design flaws. Their results had been invalid. Twenty years down the road, variations on the experiment demonstrated something rather different. When put into adjacent shock cages, one of which had a control switch and one of which didn’t, two lab rats would at first scurry and jump attempting to find a means of escape from the arbitrary administration of Thor’s lightning. The rat in one cage would soon find his control button. When the current sizzled his soles, he would lunge for the switch and turn it off, rescuing both himself and his comrade. The rat whose frantic search resulted in no discovery of a means of control, on the other hand, would eventually give up his struggle, lie down in the cage, and accept his jolts with an air of resignation.

As “learned helplessness” experiments continued, it was discovered that more than mere laziness was crippling the beast unable to contribute to the resolution of the shared dilemma. His immune system no longer protected him from disease. If given a way to escape his situation, his perception was too bleary to see it or to register its utility. His self-destruct mechanisms had taken control. All indications were that these self-maiming reflexes were physiologically pre-programmed. Most telling was the fact that the beast able to cope with the slings and arrows of a researcher’s outrageous fortunes retained a vigorous immune system, a relatively keen perception of the world around him, and remained active and energetic-despite his periodic spurts of torment. How might his neighbor’s internally-inflicted disablement aid the projection of the victim’s genes into the next generation? Apparently no one bothered to ask.

A naturalist named V.C. Wynne Edwards, however, had already observed the effects of these phenomenon in a social context. Under feral conditions innumerable species are not isolated by a cage but live as part of a larger group. Edwards studied wild grouse in the Scottish moors. Here, punishments and rewards were handed out not by scientists, but by the natural and the social environment. Male grouse whose mastery of their surroundings enabled them to find good provisions of food and safe sleeping conditions became strong and self-confident. Those less able to forage successfully or to find the safest roost became less physically robust. Weakened, they entered the seasonal competition for females. They fought their problem-mastering flockmates in one-on-one battles, and usually lost. Their failure to find a way to dominate their natural environment led to a corresponding failure to gain control in their social environment.

The successful birds ended up with avian harems, access to even more food than before, and an increased level of pep and acumen. The losers had insult heaped to their injury. As their self-destruct mechanisms kicked in, they showed symptoms which comparative psychologists have called a direct analog of human depression. Like the rats with no handle on their fate, these unfortunates gave up, resigning themselves to a position on the outskirts of the flock-the very location in which they would be most tempting to a passing fox. They lost appetite. As their immune systems shifted into low gear, they grew unhealthy. And in times of scarcity, they were the first to die.

Wynne-Edwards theorized that he was watching group selection at work. The birds whose failure had led to a physical decline, he felt, were sacrificing themselves to adjust the group size to the carrying capacity-the amount of food and other necessities-in their locale. The Scot announced his conclusions in 1962. By 1964 William Hamilton’s equations had taken the evolutionary community by storm. Wynne Edwards became the poster boy for group selection and was driven from scientific respectability. He is cited in current textbooks primarily as an exemplar of scientific error.

What Wynne-Edwards had seen at work was a complex adaptive system devilishly similar to a neural net. Those individuals within the group capable of finding solutions to the problems of the moment were rewarded with dominance, desirable food and lodging, and sexual privileges. The weak links in the group’s neural net, the individuals who had not found a means of solving the environmental puzzles thrown their way, were isolated and impoverished by the social system and disabled by self destruction.

In other words, the group had shown all the key characteristics of a functional learning machine, a complex adaptive system, or, if you prefer, a superorganism. Later, Israeli naturalist Amotz Zahavi would demonstrate that groups of birds function as communal information processing apparatuses. However Zahavi failed to put his observations together with those of Wynne Edwards, with those of the “learned helplessness” experimenters, and with the principles of complex adaptive systems.

My work since 1981 has been to demonstrate that these elements are parts of a single puzzle. The existence of self-destruct mechanisms, the fact that they are turned on and off by control of circumstance, and the fact that social animals are linked in information-exchange networks explains the mechanism behind David Sloan Wilson’s research-survey conclusion that a group usually solves problems better than the individuals within it.

In short, if one acknowledges that individuals like the grouse do indeed compete for reproductive advantage (remember the seasonal tournaments which determined which avian males would receive mates), but that their competition takes place within the framework of a connective intelligence, the idea of group selection seems a necessity. Pit one massively parallel information processor against another-a constant occurrence in nature-and that which most successfully takes advantage of complex adaptive system rules, that which is the most powerful cooperative learning machine, will almost always win.

It is time for evolutionists to open their minds and abandon individual selectionism as a rigid creed which cannot co-exist with its supposed opposite, group selection. For if I am right, the networked intelligence foreseen by computer scientists and physicists as a product of emerging technologies has been around a very long time. In fact, it has sculpted the perverse physiological makeup which manifests itself in our depressive lethargy, our paralyzing anxiety, the irritability which drives others away when we need them most, our resignation when attainment repeatedly eludes us, and the failure of our health when we become victims of overwhelming loss or crisis. These physiologically pre-wired features have made us microprocessors in the most intriguing form of parallel computer ever constructed on this earth. Without transistors, they have turned each one of us into cells of a networked brain.

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

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A United Biology

E. O. Wilson, Ph.D.

The sociobiology wars that began in the ’70s are over. The biological approach has prevailed. Yet, I totally misjudged the ignorance of the reaction that I was going to get from social scientists and political ideologues on the left on the publication of my book Sociobiology in 1975. It started a real controversy and revealed the very widespread—in fact, in places almost universal—belief in the blank slate mind: that is, a mind unaffected by genetic factors or biological processes that might predispose social behavior, especially, to develop in one direction or another. That view, that the mind was fully developed by learning, by experience, and by the contingencies of history was virtual dogma in the social sciences.

It was also dogma among the far left, who held the position taken by the Marxists and by the late Soviet Union. In the 1920s the Soviet Union dropped eugenics, a kind of prerunner of sociobiology, and switched to blank slate dogma. That was a formidable political and academic establishment on American campuses and among American intelligentsia in the 1950s, but it seems amazing to me now, looking back on the past quarter of a century, that what I wrote could be regarded as heresy. When you read Sociobiology now it looks like a fairly mild foreshadowing of what was to come.

Whatever elements of the blank slate there were in evolutionary biology and psychology vanished, or began to shrink substantially, and that’s been the tendency ever since. If there are blank slaters in the social sciences and humanities today—and I suppose there still are—it’s very hard to see how they could hold a discussion that would include anything that we actually know about how the brain works, and how child development proceeds. We’ve had a fair amount of success in many areas of interpreting human nature in evolutionary terms. They would just have to reject the science outright in the manner of religious dogmatists.

~~~

My interest is ants began when I was about nine years old I had a bug period, and I just loved the idea of going on expeditions. I grew up in Alabama and North Florida, but at the time—1939-1940—my father was a government employee in Washington D.C. We lived within walking distance of the National Zoo and Rock Creek Park, and I read National Geographic, and thought that there could be no better life in this world than going on expeditions and seeing all the wonderful things I saw and heard about in that magazine.

At the age of 9 I was running my own little expeditions with jars to preserve insects in Rock Creek Park and I was hooked. Pretty soon I was concentrating on ants and butterflies. Then we went back to southern Alabama, the Gulf coast, with its magnificent fauna and flora. This was like letting me into a candy store and I never looked back.

I went to the University of Alabama and they pretty much let me do what I wanted to do. I got into the Department of Biology and had some very good, attentive professors. It was the late ’40s and they paid close attention to me. I was a gangly 17-year-old when I first went and graduated at 19. They were used to dealing almost entirely with preparing students to go on to medical school. Here they had an authentic embryonic biologist, so I got all sorts of special attention, including my own lab space when I was a freshman—it was great.

I’m not sure you could reproduce that experience today. Science has changed a lot. For parents thinking of encouraging their children to become scientists, and especially biologists and naturalists—if the student has that inclination to start with—I would recommend liberal arts colleges, not major research institutes. Go to a major research university after you’ve had four years of a liberal arts college that believes in generalized training in biology, including natural history, with heavy emphasis on ecology. In the last several years I’ve visited a number of really outstanding ones and the difference between them and major research universities, including my own Harvard, is striking, in terms of what it can mean to an individual student.

Most science education takes a boot camp approach or is set up to train acolytes. That’s because most scientists are journeymen—they’re not masters. That is to say, they’re well-versed and if it’s a major research university they probably have some accomplishments on a narrow segment of scientific research, but basically they think like journeymen and are there to train journeymen. They don’t think particularly laterally about what their field means. There are, of course, in every university and college striking exceptions, but most scientists are recognized for and advanced by the discoveries they make. The gold and silver of science is original discovery. They know they have to be involved in making an original discovery, and to do that you move along a very narrow front.

The time will come when we’ll have to move education to broaden its base for everyone. That includes far more science than is now taught on average. The best way to treat science—I’ve had 41 years of experience teaching beginning students at Harvard, both biology majors and non-science students, so I can speak to this—is to take it from the top down. Put the big questions to them and show them how science can or cannot answer those questions.

Ask the questions right from the beginning of the freshman class: What is the meaning of sex? Why do we have to die? Why do people grow old? What’s the whole point of all this? You’ve got their attention. You talk about the scientific exploration of these issues and in order to understand them you have to understand something about the whole process of evolution and how the body works.

You say that we’re going to deal with two great principles that are the substance of biology and which you must know: One, that everything that’s in the body, including the brain and the action of the mind, is obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand it. And two, that the body, the species, and life as a whole evolved by natural selection. You take it from there and explain as best we can what we know about science, recognizing that there are still unanswered questions. If you sensibly ask what the meaning of life is, you don’t have to worry about science haters or mathophobes. You’ve got ‘em.

~~~

Lately I’ve been circling back to the large issue of consilience, the notion that there is a unity of the sciences through a network of cause and effect explanations in physics, biology and even the lower reaches of the social sciences. To that end, in addition to doing systematic, basic biodiversity research I’m conducting a reexamination of the basic theory and contents of sociobiology, beginning with insects and eventually coming back to humans.

In sociobiology, the social insects—ants, bees, wasps, termites—are so especially congenial to analysis, experiments, and theory that we can find paradigms of this kind of explanation that range from the genome, through the organism, through the colony, and through the ecosystems in which colonies live. By enriching the databases of each of those biological levels of organization, and developing middle level theory in concert with that data accumulation as we go along, we can get a much clearer and quicker picture through the social insect of how social behavior evolved in the higher vertebrates.

We can define how this works by considering ant, termite, wasp, and bee colonies as superorganisms. A superorganism is an aggregation of highly organized individuals into colonies. In the case of the social insects we have a set of criteria that we use called eusociality, which has three criteria. First, there are two major castes—a queen, or sometimes a king, which constitutes a reproductive caste, and workers that don’t reproduce as much if at all. Second, you have generations of grown, mature adults living with other grown mature individuals in the same community. And finally, you have mature adults that take care of the young. Those three elements are the primary criteria of what makes an advanced insect colony.

Insect eusocial colonies are superb systems that most people find intrinsically interesting. However, they are also superb study objects for the evolution of social existence. A lot of things have been happening for the last 20 years in experimental research on social organization, division of labor, communication, and genetic evolution, so the time has come for a new synthesis. I did one in 1971, pulling together most of what we knew about insect societies at that time, and rebuilt explanatory systems on the foundation of population biology. This was the beginning of sociobiology. I defined sociobiology then as the systematic study of the biological behavior of the social behavior in all kinds of organisms, and suggested that the way to make a real science of it was to base it on the study of the biology of population, recognizing that a society is a little population. This worked out very well. I also did a new synthesis called The Ants with Burt Holdobler in 1990, and we are now reexamining everything based on some remarkable things that we have learned in the last ten years.

We’re beginning to get some revolutionary new ideas about how social behavior originated, and also how to construct a superorganism. If we can define a set of assembly rules for superorganisms then we have a model system for how to construct an organism. How do you put an ant colony together? You start with a queen ant, which digs a hole in the ground, starts laying eggs, and goes through a series of operations that raise the first brood. The first brood then goes through a series of operations to breed more workers, and before long you’ve got soldier ants, worker ants, and foragers, and you’ve got a teeming colony. That’s because they follow a series of genetically prescribed rules of interaction, behavior, and physical development. If we can fully understand how a superorganism is put together, we’ll come much closer to general principles of how an organism is put together. There are two different levels—the cells put together to make an organism, organisms put together to make a superorganism. Right now I’m examining what we know to see if there are rules of how superorganisms are put together.

Superorganisms are superior as an experimental object, because you can do experiments in the laboratory much faster with a bunch of ants. You can take a group of ants, divide them into ten parts and experiment with them as ten parts. Suppose I were working with the operation of your hand. I could do an experiment in which I painlessly and bloodlessly cut off eight of your fingers and see how you work with two; and then put all the others back on. That’s what you can do with an ant colony much more easily. You can separate workers from the colony to experiment, put them back together, and so on.

We’re moving rapidly in this area. A little less than 50 years ago, shortly after the discovery of the structure of DNA—one of the epochcal events of science—Jim Watson, one of the first of the newly-defined, full-blooded molecular biologists, came to Harvard.

Jim and I were assistant professors together at the time, and participated in a clash of civilizations. Jim, of course, was leading the molecular revolution and for the time being I was a distinctly overmatched younger leader in organismic biology. For a couple of decades thereafter, molecular biology proceeded in its own way and began to send tendrils of investigation up into cell biology, now organismic biology, past the level of the genome in terms of truly major new discoveries and into the great Pacific Ocean, so to speak, of proteomics, the science of how proteins are assembled.

Meanwhile, evolutionary biology and organismic biology continued to grow in strength and sophistication, and extended their reach on down beyond the organism. By the 1980s we were learning about the genome, the molecular biology itself, and the consequence has been, by the late ’80s and ’90s and now increasingly, that these two once distant levels are pretty well connected, and people are moving back and forth across them rather easily. Increasingly the study of biological diversity, the variety of life and how it originated, is coming to occupy the attention of even the molecular biologists.

In that spirit of solidifying the newly found unity of the different levels of biology from ecosystems, organisms, and society down to the molecular level of genomics, and with this new-found confidence that we can do this, biology is becoming a unified, mature science, and we now find that the old conflict’s gone. Jim and I will be having a public dialogue soon on the relation between DNA and the great discoveries in the molecular period on the one side, and the exploration of the world’s biodiversity on the other. We can put those things together in discussion now, and this will be a very interesting conversation. I hope. At the very least it’s symbolic of how much has happened in this half-century in biology since we started here in the department at Harvard as adversaries.

At the same time, however, biology is very far from being a fully mature science. A mature science would be one in which we thoroughly understand the following big, open topics:

One is the nature of consciousness and of mind. These are biological subjects, and they’re phenomena not just limited to human beings, since we can see their early origins in other vertebrates, particularly the other primates.

Another principal domain in biology that is still largely unexplored is the assembly and maintenance of ecosystems. How do ecosystems—assemblages of plants and animals—live more or less stably for an indefinite period of time? How do they come together in the first place? How are certain species chosen to enter that community? How do they manage to survive? And how does the ecosystem fit together in a way that provides stability?

We’re nibbling at the edges of these issues, but community ecology is very far from getting out of its infancy. This is still a very open question of primary importance not only for the biology of the whole but, of course, for the sustainable use of our resources, and for the saving of the rest of life through scientifically-based conservation.

Conceptually, the development of a united biology would also certainly include what we’re calling proteomics. This relates to the question of how, after elementary transcription and formation of the proteins, genes are turned on and off. They appear and then do certain things, in part, due to context, location, and pre-existing proteins. It takes one or two hundred thousand kinds of proteins to form a cell.

How exactly do they come together? Most molecular biologists are now focusing on that area. Right now we’re at the level of hundreds of species whose genomes have been decoded pretty thoroughly. Once we understand more about the diversity in the genetic code of thousands of species, what strategies will we be able to see the genes following as they create proteins and as the proteins assemble cells? What pathways of evolution have been followed in the course of making what adaptations in the environment?

This brings us to the entire question of biological diversity, which is one of my major concerns now. We probably know, and in the most elementary manner, no more than ten percent of the species of plants, animals, and microorganisms sufficiently well enough to give the species a scientific name. Ninety percent remain unknown, particularly if you throw in the bacteria and other similar, simple organisms called archaeons. We’ve got to get about the business of exploring the planet’s biodiversity.

The project that I’ve put my shoulders behind was called the All-Species Project. We had a summit conference here at Harvard a little less than two years ago to bring together people who want to see this happen and believe it could be made to happen in 25 years, much in the manner of the human genome project, if we were to want it. We agreed on the main issue: that new technologies make it possible for this to be done. We’re ready to build up the systematics of biodiversity exploration around the world and could pull this off and make a huge difference in biology and environmental management.

We established enthusiastic partnerships with various agencies, both governmental and non-governmental, but the sinking economy brought us against the wall of insufficient funding. There are still major enterprises around the world that are doing this on a continental level, or are starting up on global scale, so within a relatively short period of time we’ll see these efforts begin to coalesce. I just got off the phone giving a very positive evaluation of the fundraising drive of one of these organizations, which is going for a $9 million endowment. They’re getting ambitious, have a compelling argument, and I believe it will happen. It’s just a matter of when. The All-Species Project is simply a term used to describe this worldwide movement to complete the exploration of the planet.

If we do not know 90 percent of the kinds of organisms that exist on the earth, what would knowing almost all mean for us? There are overpowering arguments for undertaking this project. It would mean that for the first time we would know all of the bacteria around the world. We would understand potential disease organisms, as well as the fundamental bacterial elements of ecosystems, the very primitive but elementary organisms that form a large part of the base of the ecosystem. Right now we don’t even know what the majority of organisms are doing. After cataloguing all of the world’s species we would have a huge reservoir of knowledge from which to draw genes for transgenic changing of crops, and the development of new pharmaceuticals.

This would also greatly enlarge biology. Bear in mind that biology is primarily a descriptive science. It deals with the particularity of species and their adaptation to the environment. Although biology is based on the principals of physics and chemistry—at least it is consistent with them—its actual substance is an account of the individual biologies of thousands and eventually millions of species, each of which has a unique history—in many cases millions of years old—of exquisitely adapting and interacting with one another at certain parts of the environment. We don’t know what most of that is. Supporting All Species’ effort for the planet has not only a logic behind it to bring biology more quickly to maturity, but also promises huge practical applications.

I talked about some of these issues in my book, The Future of Life, which came out early in 2002 and had some success, but there has to be a change in the culture. The way that this can be accomplished is to open the eyes of the scientific community, the government, and non-governmental supporting organizations to the tremendous cost-effectiveness and potential benefits of pulling off a full inventory of species-level diversity.

For the past 20 years, during my service on the boards of directors or advisory boards of most of the major global conservation organizations and in my research in this field there has been a question of how to balance the importance of saving biodiversity with that of saving jobs and helping the poor. There isn’t any question any more that saving the rest of life is compatible with saving and improving the lot of humanity. In fact, to push for one means to push for the other, and to let the one go means that you let a lot of the other go.

The major global conservation organizations have long since included in their programs an emphasis on economic development, on-site pilot programs, and fundraising to improve economies in areas of high conservation value on a sustainable basis. And it turns out that it works. I could spend hours talking about the examples and the economics of it and so on, but the bottom line is that the two great goals of the 21st century are, first, raising people around the world to a decent standard of living, particularly the 80% of the people living in developing countries, and second, bringing as much of the rest of life through with us. If we can do this, we will obtain the kind of better world that people everywhere believe should be our major human purpose.

And it’s practicable—it is not at all expensive, in terms of the world domestic product. For example, Conservation International convened economists and biologists two years ago in order to estimate how much it would cost to save the rest of biodiversity. It turns out that in order to save the world’s 25 hottest hot spots —those places where you have the greatest endangerment to whole ecosystems with large numbers of species—and then add the cost of saving the core wilderness areas of the great tropical forests of the Congo, the Amazon, and New Guinea, it would cost one payment of about $28 billion.

This is equal to approximately one part in a thousand of the world’s domestic product. That’s one tenth of one percent of the annual economic output of the world! One payment could cover 70 percent of the species of plants and animals that we know about on earth, so this is something that’s obtainable. And part and parcel of that would be to improve the economies of the areas in which the main biodiversity is located.

Copyright © 2003 by Edge Foundation, Inc

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We repost this article from May 2002, Future Positive.

Complexity is Just a Word! *

What is complexity, asks author-journalist George Johnson in a recent “Science Times,” the science section of The New York Times (May 5, 1997)? Below the headline, “Researchers on Complexity Ponder What It’s All About,” Johnson reports that there is still no agreed-upon definition, much less a theoretically-rigorous formalization, despite the fact that complexity is currently a “hot” research topic. Many books and innumerable scholarly papers have been published on the subject in the past few years, and there is even a new journal, Complexity, devoted to this nascent science. Johnson quotes Dan Stein, chairman of the physics department at the University of Arizona: “Everybody talks about it. [But] in the absence of a good definition, complexity is pretty much in the eye of the beholder.”

This is not to say that the researchers in this area have not been trying to define it. In the 1970s, Gregory Chaitin and Alexei Kolmogorov (independently) pioneered a mathematical measuring-rod that Chaitin called “algorithmic complexity” — that is, the length of the shortest “recipe” for the complete reproduction of a mathematical treatment. The problem with this definition, as Chaitin concedes, is that random sequences are invariably more complex because in each case the recipe is as long as the whole thing being specified; it cannot be “compressed”.

More recently, Charles Bennett has focussed on the concept of “logical depth” — the computational requirements for converting a recipe into a finished product. Though useful, it seems to be limited to processes in which there is a logical structure of some sort. It would seem to exclude the “booming, buzzing confusion” of the real world, where the internal logic may be problematical or only partially knowable — say the immense number of context-specific chaotic interactions that are responsible for producing global weather “patterns”, or the imponderable forces that will determine the future course of the evolutionary process itself.

A number of researchers, especially those who are associated with the Santa Fe Institute, believe that the key lies in the so-called “phase transitions” between highly ordered and highly disordered physical systems. An often-cited analogy is water, whose complex physical properties lie between the highly ordered state of ice crystals and the highly disordered movements of steam molecules. While the “Santa Fe Paradigm” may be useful, it also sets strict limits on what can be termed “complex”. For instance, it seems to exclude the extremes associated with highly ordered or strictly random phenomena, even though there can be more or less complex patterns of order and more or less complex forms of disorder — degrees of complexity that are not associated with phase transitions. (Indeed, random phenomena seem to be excluded by fiat from some definitions of complexity.)

To confuse matters further, a distinction must be made between what could be labelled “objective complexity” — the “embedded” properties of a physical phenomenon and “subjective complexity” — its “meaning” to a human observer. As Timothy Perper has observed (on-line communication), the equation w = f(z) is structurally simple, but it might have a universe of meaning depending upon how its terms are defined. Indeed, information theory is notorious for its reliance on quantitative, statistical measures and its blindness to meaning — where much can be made of very few words. The telephone directory for a large metropolitan area contains many more words than a Shakespeare play, but is it more complex? Furthermore, as Elisabet Sahtouris has pointed out (on-line communication), the degree of complexity that we might impute to a phenomenon can depend upon our frame of reference for viewing it. If we adopt a broad, “ecological” perspective we will see many more factors, and relationships, at work than if we adopt a “physiological” perspective. When Howard Bloom (on-line communication) quotes the line “To see the World in a Grain of Sand…” from William Blake’s famous poem, “Auguries of Innocence”, it reminds us that even a simple object can denote a vast pattern of relationships, if we choose to see it that way. Accordingly, subjective complexity is a highly variable property of the phenomenal world.

Perhaps we need to go back to the semantic drawing-board. Complexity is, after all, a word — a verbal construct, a mental image. Like the words “electron” or “snow” or “blue” or “tree”, complexity is a shorthand tool for thinking and communicating about various aspects of the phenomenal world. Some words may be very narrow in scope. (Presumably all electrons are alike in their basic properties, although their behavior can vary greatly.) However, many other words may hold a potful of meaning. We often use the word “snow” in conversation without taking the trouble to differentiate among the many different kinds of snow, as serious skiers (and Inuit eskimos) routinely do. Similarly, the English word “blue” refers to a broad band of hues in the color spectrum, and we must drape the word with various qualifiers, from navy blue to royal blue to robin’s egg blue (and many more), to denote the subtle differences among them. So it is also, I believe, with the word “complexity”; it is used in many different ways and encompasses a great variety of phenomena. (Indeed, it seems that many theorists, to suit their own purposes, prefer not to define complexity too precisely.)

The “utility” of any word, whether broad or narrow in scope, is always a function of how much information it imparts to the user(s). Take the word “tree”, for example. It tells you about certain fundamental properties that all trees have in common. But it does not tell you whether or not a given tree is deciduous, whether it is tall or short, or even whether it is living or dead. The same shortcoming applies also to the concept of “complexity”. Although there may be some commonalities between a complex personality, a complex wine, a complex piece of music and a complex machine, the similarities are not obvious. Each is complex in a different way, and their complexities cannot be reduced to an all-purpose algorithm. Moreover, the differences among them are at least as important as any common properties.

What in fact does the word “complexity” connote. One of the leaders in the complexity field, Seth Lloyd of MIT, took the trouble to compile a list of some three dozen different ways in which the term is used in scientific discourse. However, this exercise produced no blinding insight. When asked to define complexity, Lloyd told Johnson: “I can’t define it for you, but I know it when I see it.”

Rather than trying to define what complexity is, perhaps it would be more useful to identify the properties that are commonly associated with the term. I would suggest that complexity often (not always) implies the following attributes: (1) a complex phenomenon consists of many parts (or items, or units, or individuals); (2) there are many relationships/interactions among the parts; and (3) the parts produce combined effects (synergies) that are not easily predicted and may often be novel, unexpected, even surprising.

At the risk of inviting the wrath of the researchers in this field, I would argue that complexity per se is one of the less interesting properties of complex phenomena. The differences, and the unique combined properties (synergies) that arise in each case, are vastly more important than the commonalities. If someone does develop a grand, unifying definition-description of complexity, I predict that it will add very little to the tree of knowledge (pardon the pun). But that shouldn’t deter us from trying; the very effort to do so will surely enrich our understanding.

Copyright © 2001 ISCS.

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 * With thanks to Howard Bloom, Timothy Perper, Elisabet Sahtouris, Peter Frost, Reed Konsler and the pseudonymous Just Mice for a provocative and insightful on-line discussion within Howard Bloom’s “International Paleopsychology Project” group.

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More by Peter Corning

Google Glossary on Complexity

Recently, the concept of memes has been presented here. Recall synergic scientist N. Arthur Coulter‘s warning that we were caught in THE MACHINE. Held there by powerful protodynes and sociodynes. A protodyne is a strong unconscious belief that a human individual holds. This belief is programmed deep into the mind by one’s life experience. For any individual a protodyne is “real”. We humans will act as if these beliefs are true whether they are or not. An acrophobic believes that being in the open is very dangerous. They will not leave their homes. They cannot be convinced that it is safe to go out into the open. The root word “-dyne” is from physics it means force. Strong unconscious beliefs held by individuals that force them to behave in specific ways are called protodynes.

When a strong unconscious belief is held by a group of people or a nation of people, it affects the whole group or the whole nation. Sociodynes force groups of people or nations of people to behave in specific ways. Coulter coined these terms in the late 60s and early 70s. Independently of Coulter, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe the same forces. The term meme has survived and become much better known than the term protodyne although they have the same meaning. Protodynes are individual memes. Sociodynes are collective memes.  As Coulter explains:

The endless repetition of the Machine is nothing more than the projection, upon the screen of social consciousness, of the Identic mode of function.

This insight provides the basis for understanding why the Machine has such power over us. It is because we unconsciously give it that power. It is as if the Machine were under the control of a pseudomind, operating entirely in the Identic and Reactive modes. Like the Freudian Id, which imposes its protodynes to control the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions of the individual consciousness, this pseudo-mind imposes its sociodynes upon our social consciousness.

It will be useful to give this pseudo-mind a name. I call it Dysergy Prime because it is a primary source of dysergy upon the planet earth.

The opposite of synergy is dysergy. Dysergy is working against. If we are to escape from THE MACHINE AND DYSERGY PRIME, we must break the trance that our individual and collective memes–that our protodynes and sociodynes–hold us in.

For a different perspective, we repost this article by synergic scientist Peter Corning.

There is much ado in evolutionary biology and some of the social sciences these days about an imperialistic paradigm known as “universal Darwinism,” and the related concept of “memes.” Memes, it seems, are the “new, new thing” (to quote the title of a best-selling book on the high technology boom and Silicon Valley). According to the promoters of universal Darwinism, any form of evolutionary change may be viewed as Darwinian in character if it exhibits three key properties: (1) a system of “replicators” (genes are the model, of course), (2) variations among the replicators, and (3) differential “selection” among the varying replicators in each generation via competition. Some adherents also espouse a fourth, sometimes implicit assumption, namely that the replicators have a degree of autonomy that allows them actively to pursue their selfish interests. On the other hand, the selection process is viewed as a purely impersonal, amorphous (mindless) process. Accordingly, in universal Darwinism the replicators are often touted as the primary actors. The fountainhead for this paradigm is, of course, Richard Dawkins’ best-seller, The Selfish Gene.

Some universal Darwinists, Daniel Dennett, Gary Cziko and, most notably, psychologist Susan Blackmore in her new book The Meme Machine (1999), see this reductionist evolutionary dynamic at work in human societies as well. In cultural evolution, Blackmore claims, the replicators are hypothetical entities called memes, a term coined by Dawkins as a cultural analogue for genes. Dawkins intended it as a metaphor, but Blackmore (and others) argue that memes are real physical entities, like genes (DNA). Moreover, memes have a mind of their own; they compete among themselves “for their own sake” [Blackmore's emphasis]. Just as Dawkins characterized organisms as “machines” for making more genes, so every human is “a machine for making more memes….We are meme machines,” Blackmore tells us. Citing the dubious assertion by Stephen Pinker that humans have “surplus” mental abilities (especially imitative abilities) that cannot be accounted for as adaptations for survival and reproduction, Blackmore contends that the selfish interests of memes can explain the evolution of these otherwise inexplicable surplus abilities. Memes have taken control of our cultural evolution, she says. (In fact, Pinker’s thesis contradicts evolutionary theory. Such costly anatomical characters would have been subject to stringent adverse selection if they had not been adaptive for evolving humans. See the discussion of this issue in my new book, Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind.)

The trouble is, memes don’t really exist as a distinct causal agency in evolution, and saying they do won’t make it so; I predict that they will prove to be more elusive than the Higgs boson. As a metaphor for various forms of learned cultural “information”, the term might be quite useful. It has the advantage of being more generic than such familiar terms as “ideas”, “inventions”, “behaviors”, “artifacts”, etc., and it is certainly preferable to such clumsy neologisms as Edward Wilson’s “culturgens”. But as a shaper of cultural evolution independently of the motivations, goals, purposes, compulsions and judgments — in short the minds — of human actors, memes rank right up there with the fiery phogiston and the heavenly aether. Indeed, there is no way I can conceive of to demonstrate (or falsify) the assertion that memes exercise an autonomous influence in human societies. Genes, and the coils of DNA that comprise the germ plasm, have an independent physical existence and known causal influences. Memes are labels that have been given to whatever we learn from one another — “stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions,” according to Blackmore. We are told that anything we imitate — hair styles, clothes, applauding, dances, cigarette smoking, superstitions, jokes, religion, and democracy, not to mention science and technology, is a meme.

The conceit that minds are “robots vehicles” — passive receptacles for various external inputs — vastly oversimplifies both the neurobiology and the psychology of human learning processes, not to mention the dynamics of cultural life. “Memetics”, as its practitioners like to call their hopeful monster (to borrow term), is a curious throwback to the Behaviorist tabula rasa hypothesis — the claim that human behavior is wholly determined by external inputs (“reinforcers”). To the contrary, memes are always embedded in minds (anything external is only a “latent” meme), and it is minds that do the selecting and use of memes. Humans do not slavishly imitate whatever they see, or hear. They are highly selective, and manipulative, both in terms of their personal choices and in what they may attempt to foist on others. Denial of the primacy of human actors in the selection and transmission of social behavior and cultural information is bad psychology — and bad anthropology. I’m reminded of a whimsical old poem about ghosts that I will take the liberty of bowdlerizing: “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a meme who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that he would go away.”

But can’t it also be said that ideas, ideologies, religions, books, music, technologies, etc., “compete” with one another? Yes, of course, but only metaphorically. To be precise, memes are differentially selected by prospective users, based on the users’ preferences. Memes themselves are “powerless” despite the uncharacteristic “hype” of Scientific American, which recently featured a promotional article by Blackmore on “The Power of Memes“. False analogies can do a lot of mischief, so it is important to keep the meme in its proper place as a term of convenience for a broad category of social phenomena and not as a distinct, self-serving causal agency. In so doing, we can also lend support to the null hypothesis: we call the shots on whether or not to imitate the purveyors of this particular meme.

Copyright © 2001 ISCS.

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More by Peter Corning

This morning’s article describes some mechanisms designed to release and increase your effective human intelligence. This article is excerpted from the Revised Internet Edition of Human Synergetics.

The Human Potential

N. Arthur Coulter, Jr, MD

Every human being is unique. We are not mass-produced according to some blueprint or master plan, each identical with the other. Each of us emerges from a different design, a different set of genes. But more than this, each of us has a unique history—a unique sequence of events that happened to us, together with our responses to those events and our reflections on the experience. Even identical twins, having duplicate genes, are distinguished from each other by their unique histories. In short, you are one of a kind. There is no other person in the world quite like you, there never has been, and there never will be.

In addition to being unique, every human being is precious. It took a billion or more years of evolution to make you what you are-an evolutionary process that is itself unique. Moreover, you are a being of incredible complexity — the design of the human ear or the human eye, for example, is simply magnificent. As for the human brain, it is a supercomputer whose intricacies and powers are far, far in advance of any of the artificial computers, which simply imitate and expand the simplest of those powers. The fact that a computer can do arithmetic much faster than a human brain may be of interest, but the really remarkable fact is that human brains invented arithmetic and designed computers to do it.

All this implies that each human being has a unique potential and that it is simply outrageous that everything possible is not done to permit that potential to develop. Yet every society on this planet not only does not do this, but is full of barriers and pressures to prevent it!

There are, for example, the twig-benders. These are groups that consider children to be a form of plant life and seek to capture them at an early age, hoping to bend the twigs in a direction that will force them to grow the way the twig-benders want them to. And so they indoctrinate them with their TRUTHS and inculcate them with their VALUES and above all instill in them habits and attitudes to ensure their obedience and conformity.

Of course, it doesn’t work. Children aren’t twigs. They are selfdetermined beings with a sense of their own individuality and worth, and they naturally rebel. But they are also small and dependent and, to the degree necessary, they submit to the twig-benders. The result is not only a messed-up world with a lot of messed-up people; far worse than that, it is a tragic waste of human potential. To paraphrase the poet, we all end up strangers and afraid, in a world we never made. And the tremendous potentials of our unique minds remain undeveloped. Comparatively speaking, we are mental dwarfs when we could have been giants.

Individual Synergetics starts with the heurism that we are unique, self-determined beings. Unlike some schools, its goal is not to eliminate “aberrations” or “neuroses” that cause people to deviate from “normality” (whatever that is), but to provide ideas and tools to enable the individual to eliminate the impedances blocking his uniq e development and to activate the unique synergies of his own mind. That is why we insist that the individual is always in charge of his own case. That is why we insist that coaching is not a form of psychotherapy, which implies that the coach is an Authority who Knows Best. No other person, no matter how wise or clever he may be, no matter how many books he has written or degrees he has earned or patients he has treated, can possibly know your mind as well as you do. True, he may see things that you have blocked from your awareness; but his vision is always partial and incomplete and superficial, from the outside. You are the only one who can see your mind from the inside; you are the only one who has access to all the data; you are the only one who can fit all the pieces together into a synergic whole.

It is this uniqueness that we respectfully and lovingly address; and all the ideas and tools of synergetics — no matter how pedantically they may be expressed-are designed from this perspective. Try them out if you wish; use them if they work; but never hesitate to adapt the tool to your needs or to change it to fit your own knowledge and experience.

The first step in Individual Synergetics — and the foundation of all that follows-is to focus on your uniqueness and to take charge of your own development. From this perspective, let us now examine the human potential, bearing in mind that everything that is said needs to be modified and tailored to fit that wonderful uniqueness.

The idea that the human mind is “an instrument of fantastic power and subtlety” whose “powers are barely tapped” has occurred to many human minds at various times and places. It is an appealing idea. Everyone would like to be supersmart, have total recall, and be irresistible to the opposite sex. The very appeal of the idea leads us to be defensive about it. At the same time, charlatans constantly exploit this appeal for their own enrichment, making matters more difficult for serious workers in this field. Despite these handicaps, there has been growing interest recently in the development of the human potential.

No attempt will be made, in this chapter to present a detailed chart of the potential abilities of the human mind. Instead, I will simply outline some domains of experience and action that are available to humans but do not appear to be fully used. These domains are used extensively in synergetics.

The average person appears to function largely on what we call the mind band of experience-he identifies with his ordinary consciousness and will. There is, however, potentially available an expanded consciousness, which we will call the broad band. Just as the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum made possible a host of new inventions such as radio, television, x-rays, infrared lamps and cameras, so may the exploration and use of the broad band make available new abilities to the individual.

It is convenient to describe the broad band in terms of the following domains:

1. The tempos
2. The tracks
3. The holistic level
4. Synergic team functions
 

The Tempos

Whatever the ego is aware of, at any given moment, we call the contents of consciousness. A content may be a sensation-the sight of a tree, the sound of a passing car, the smell of a rose, the taste of orange juice. Or it may be an idea-the idea of justice or conformity or happiness. It may be a mental image-the face of a loved one or a barber pole or a prune. It may be an emotional feeling of sadness or excitement or fear. It may be the recollection of a past incident or the anticipation of a future event. At any given moment, a large number of contents present themselves to awareness. The ego can selectively focus attention on some contents while ignoring others; but the focus is ordinarily on contents.

These contents are usually not fixed or static, however. As time goes on, they may change-in location, in intensity, in the features they present, in their relations to other contents. They may disappear from awareness while new contents appear. The continuous shifting, changing, emergence and disappearance of contents was described by William James in a famous metaphor as the stream of consciousness.

The stream of consciousness may be regarded as composed of a number of processes involving the various contents. Now, just as physical objects in motion have different velocities, so do the processes of the stream of consciousness have different tempos. Some occur very rapidly, others slowly, some so slowly they appear to be stationary. It is convenient to select one process whose characteristic tempo is familiar to all as a basis for comparison-the process of ordinary speech. We refer to processes having the tempo of speech as  orthoprocesses. Those that occur much more rapidly, we call microprocesses, those that occur much more slowly, macroprocesses.

We could, of course, devise a spectrum of process tempos, analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum. But it is unnecessary to be I so precise for our purposes. Just as visible light is used as a reference band in the electromagnetic spectrum, with infrared on one side and ultraviolet on the other, so can we roughly identify whether a process is an ortho, micro, or macroprocess.

It is at once evident that in ordinary’ consciousness, attention is focused almost entirely on orthoprocesses. Yet we can, if we choose, examine micro and macroprocesses. Indeed, this is one way consciousness may be expanded. We are not here referring, it should be noted, to the alteration of time sense that occurs under the influence of certain drugs, or in the state of hypnosis. What we refer to is a different kind of consciousness-expansion, one which opens the way to the development of a number of “new” abilities.

The microprocesses are particularly interesting. Usually we are unaware of their existence, but under special conditions we realize that an extraordinary number of very fast processes go on in company with the slower orthoprocesses.

A man driving a car with casual control suddenly observes the cars ahead abruptly stopping. In a flash he (a) evaluates his own speed, (b) predicts he cannot brake in time to avoid a collision, (c) evaluates the left lane to be unsafe, (d) decides to swerve to the right onto the shoulder, and (e) does so. All these processes occur in a fraction of a second. The driver may not be fully aware of them at the time, but they are recorded in memory and he can readily recall them. They occur in a rapid-fire sequence of flashes. In this case, they are simp y processes that ordinarily occur at ortho tempo, but have been speeded up under stress. (They are not “instinctive” because another person might panic under the same circumstances, and each process is one previously learned by the driver.) Not all microprocesses are of this type, however (i.e., speeding up of orthoprocesses).

Microprocesses occur frequently when the synergic mode is turned on, and indeed are one of the delights of the synergic mode. The experience of thoughts racing along several tracks simultaneously can be highly exhilarating. The expansion of consciousness to include microprocesses in addition to orthoprocesses is well worth the effort, in our opinion.

On the other side of the orthoprocesses are the macroprocesses — processes that go on so slowly that they usually escape notice, except for the vague realization that things have somehow changed. But they are there, and they are every bit as interesting as the microprocesses.

The mind-dweller characteristically is occupied with the present. He bases his judgments on the perspective of the moment and shifts with the tide as it turns without being aware that the tide is there. He interprets the past purely in terms of the values of “now,” and anticipates the future in the same terms.

Yet macroprocesses do occur; and most of us use them and are aware of them, to a degree. The flexible, patient pursuit of a longrange goal; the consistent application of a policy; the follow-through on a decision-these are examples of processes that occur at slow tempo that are familiar. However, there are others that go on that escape our notice, for which we have no names. We may look at a problem today and feel there is no way to solve it; the next day, looking at the same problem, we suddenly see how easy it is. The problem did not change, we did; yet we are unaware of the process by which this change occurred. This is another example of a macroprocess. We can expand our consciousness so as to become aware of these processes and to develop new abilities that use them.

To see each present moment in itself, in all the boundless variety and richness there to be found is, of course, important. But one can, do this without being stuck in present time. The domain of macroprocesses can also be lived in; it enables one, so to speak, to function as a four-dimensional being, to whom each “now” is but a phase of a process flowing on, and in terms of a perspective from which all “nows” are “present.”

It is in this domain that an individual evolves. These are the processes by which we may effect lasting changes in our being. They provide the means for achieving temporal organization of our experience. It is a domain well worth knowing better and using more.

The Tracks

As mind-dwellers, we not only confine ourselves to the tempo of orthoprocesses; we also limit our orientation to the contents of consciousness-the sights, the sounds, the images, the feelings, the desires, the memories, and so on.

But these contents do not just happen; they are produced by an activity that we refer to as operations. Thus, we associate one idea  with another; we compare these ideas, noting similarities and differences; we recall a memory of a previous incident; we search for a felt idea; we express or sublimate or repress an emotion. Each of these acts is an operation, and, of course, we have always known of their existence. But our characteristic orientation is toward contents, not operations.

We may make the distinction between content and operation clearer by comparing what goes on in our minds with what goes on in a movie. The contents of awareness are like the moving picture on the screen; our attention is focused on the screen. The operations of awareness are like the processes going on in the movie projector. We rarely pay any attention to the projector.

Yet there is a simple act by which we can shift our orientation from content to operation. Curiously, this act apparently has no name. Borrowing a term from electrical engineering, we refer to this act as phase shift, because it is a shift in the phase of orientation. Phase shift goes counter to the “natural tendency of the mind”; but it is a simple act and one that is readily learned. With practice, it is possible not only to perform phase shift easily and habitually, but also to maintain it as an orientation without losing contact with contents. When this is done, another new domain of experience becomes available.

It is convenient to give this new domain a name. We therefore introduce the term main track to denote the domain of experience occurring as a result of the orientation to contents that we ordinarily use, and hypertrack to denote the domain of experience occurring as a result of sustained orientation to operations.

As with any new skill, learning to orient to hypertrack is awkward at first. (Remember your first effort to ride a bicycle?) But gradually we learn to use it and soon become fascinated with the new perspective it gives us and the potentialities for development it affords. An immediate advantage is a greatly heightened ability to understand other human beings. Operations produce contents. Hypertrack orients us to the causal level of human thought, feeling and action.

There are other advantages that will become apparent as we proceed. One point soon emerges, however, Our language is adapted for use on the “mind band” — main track and orthoprocesses. It does not lend itself readily to communication about the domain of hypertrack (or the other domains of the broad band). There are many operations and processes of the broad band for which words do not yet exist. Hence, it has been necessary to introduce a number of new technical terms to describe these operations and processes. “Hypertrack” is an example of such a term. We refer to the evolving collection of such terms, affectionately, as “synergese.” When syngeneers speak in synergese, it can be rather annoying to someone who is unfamiliar with the language. But every field has its technical jargon, including sports like baseball or football.

There is another sense in which language is inadequate. As noted, language is designed for the mind band of main track and orthoprocesses. It is not well-suited for managing the events of hypertrack or other domains of the broad band. Here, an analogy with computer science is helpful. The “language” that computers use is the language of numbers, actually a special kind of number composed of binary digits (zero and one). This is called machine language. It is very tedious and difficult to program a computer in machine language. Consequently, a number of special languages, called programming languages, have been invented. These are close enough to ordinary language (like English) that they are relatively easy to learn and to use. Programs to control computers are written in one of these programming languages (such as FORTRAN, which stands for FORmula TRANslator). The computer then translates these programs into machine language automatically.

In the case of the broad band available to the human mind, we are confronted with a more difficult problem, the opposite of that which computer programmers had to solve. Computers were designed by humans, and the language they use, machine language, is known. We still know very little, however, about the broad band. Nevertheless, by trial and error, we are gradually developing a special language for controlling the broad band more effectively. It is called SYNTALK 1. It is still not very well-defined, and a definitive version has not yet been presented. We won’t do so here. However, portions of SYNTALK I will be included in later sections of this book. This is a promising area for research by creative workers in synergetics especially computer programmers.

One further remark about hypertrack: the ability to use hypertrack is basic to tracking, a powerful technique for controlling thought processes. This will be described later.

Phase shift, as we have noted, is the mental operation of focusing attention upon operations rather than contents. The inverse operation, moving from operations back to contents, is relatively easy to use. But there is another operation that is possible, a shift from main track to a more elemental and primordial domain. We refer to this operation as prime shift, and the domain “below” main track as prime track.

Prime track is the march of events as sensed before their organization into contents of the mind. It is the series of black marks on a white background from which you are now forming words with meaning. It is the set of processes actually going on when you are SICK and have MEASLES or a COLD. It is the “real world” out there and not the SIGHT or SOUND that gives you knowledge of it. It is your friend as he actually is, not the GOOD OLD PAL you think of him as. It is yourself in a strange place without your bearings, not the “I” that is somehow LOST.

In dealing with prime track, we sometimes adopt the convention of capitalizing all words describing what is perceived on main track. This permits the individual to perform a prime shift if he so desires.
Prime shift evokes the realization that, in ordinary consciousness, our attention is focused, not on the actual present, but on the immediate past. By the time the raw data of sense have organized themselves into contents, time has already moved on. We are always one step behind in our perception of events. It is a very short step — a fraction of a second-but during that brief moment a variety of processes go on. This is another part of the domain of the fabulous microprocesses. In this fleeting moment many exciting and important things happen, of which we are ordinarily oblivious. Prime shift enables us to develop an awareness of these processes. We also learn that, once a content has been created, it tends to persist even when it no longer adequately represents what is currently happening. This is a major source of illusion.

One of the subtle fallacies to which the human mind is subject is the tendency to regard the sum total of its perceptions at any given moment as a complete representation of the world at that moment, When we reflect on this, we realize that this is not so; but the tendency persists anyhow. Several workers such as Arbib (5) and Fischer (6), have pointed out that perception is not just a passive process of highfidelity mapping of the environment, but an active process of continuously constructing and reconstructing a map on the basis of sensory input cues, with selective emphasis on those referents that are relevant to the goals and interests of the individual. Furthermore, the perceptual systems on which the human mind depend for information endow its maps of reality with a particular quality that is by no means necessarily universal. An animal with a well-developed sense of smell, such as a dog, probably has a different quality for its maps; and one can conceive of organisms sensitive to ultraviolet or infrared radiation, or to ultrasonic sounds, or to magnetic fields or other forms of energy, also having a quality for their maps that might be quite different from those of human beings.

Prime shift enables the individual, to some extent at least, to free himself from exclusive linkage to main track contents. It brings to attention events and processes at the subgestalt level, processes that are filtered out by exclusive focus on main track. It also brings to awareness cognizance of what is left out-the realization, not just at an intellectual level, but at a concrete, action-influencing level, that far more is going on at a given moment than a person can possibly be conscious of.

Korzybski was fond of insisting “whatever you say a thing is, it is not.” This paradoxical statement could be irritating, but its intent was to focus cognizance upon what is left out of any verbal representation no matter how precisely and thoroughly it is expressed. He also adopted the convention of frequent use of “etc.” to remind the reader or listener of the necessarily partial and incomplete character of his statements. It is a wise convention.

Prime shift is also useful in breaking up identifications-the unconscious linkages (and blockages) of the Identic Mode. When combined with phase shift, it provides a powerful tool for clearing impedances, those “irrational” patterns of perception, thought, emotion, body control, and action that slow down and interfere with the effectiveness of mental function. This is discussed in more detail later.

Prime track, main track, and hypertrack thus comprise three levels of the broad band, just as microprocesses, orthoprocesses, and macroprocesses comprise three different characteristic tempos of events. It should be noted that hypertrack or prime track processes can also move at any of the three tempos. There are thus three times three, or nine, different “narrow bands” of the broad band as thus far described.

But this is not all. Effective function in the broad band requires the development of synergies among the various tracks and tempos. Thus, there is main track-hypertrack synergy, consisting of interactions that promote processes at both levels. Similarly, there is macroprocess-orthoprocess synergy. And so on. Etc.

As these synergies occur (as well as other synergies discussed later), there emerges a synergic whole that is greater than the mere sum of its parts. For lack of a better term, we sometimes refer to it as the “holistic” or whole being level. This emphasizes one of its aspects. But in another aspect, it is an old friend-the synergic mode.

A characteristic of the whole being level is that the individual no longer identifies with his consciousness and will. These become merely particular functions associated with main track and orthoprocesses the “mind band” of experience. They are the command functions of the ordinary ego.

As a working hypothesis, we propose the view that the human mind is still evolving, and that the ordinary ego is a “transitional control center” which, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, will some day expand into a new control center, the Director, competent to the management of the broad band.

Be this as it may, there is another aspect of the whole being level that needs to be described, an aspect that is actually another domain of experience of the broad band. If, from the orientation of hypertrack, the individual performs another phase shift, an operation that concomitantly embraces all tracks and tempos, this new domain emerges into awareness. We refer to this domain as ultratrack
It is extremely difficult, at first, to sustain an ultratrack orientation. What seems to be necessary is for a relatively high degree of synergy among the various tracks and tempos to be first established.
It is very difficult to describe in words the view from ultratrack or the processes that occur at this level. At this point, it seems wiser merely to define it as we have, as the level from which all tracks and tempos are viewed and managed, and to rely on the experience of the reader to fill in details.

Synergic Team Functions

A relatively stable orientation to the broad band is difficult to achieve at present. The operations of prime shift and phase shift are relatively easy to learn, however, as are the operations of selective focus upon microprocesses and macroprocesses. With practice and the use of exercises and techniques described later, one finds the broad band becoming increasingly accessible. Even here, however, this is best achieved in an environment in which the individual is relatively free from pressures and distractions. In ordinary social discourse and interactions, there are very strong constraints that force the individual to function almost entirely on the mind band. It is possible to resist these constraints to a certain degree, but the effort and struggle involved are considerable. It seems wiser, at first, simply to accept these constraints as “forces of nature” like the force of gravity, and to reserve efforts to expand into the broad band for synergetic sessions.

One of these constraints is the simple act of verbal communication, which plays so dominant a role in social discourse and interaction. This act, almost by definition, constrains the individual to orthoprocesses and main track. And it is curiously difficult to be silent in the presence of another without feeling uncomfortable about it. The maxim that “silence is golden” seems to apply to another era.

Nevertheless, there are a few simple techniques that promote function on the broad band in the presence of another, which we have found useful. This is especially so when the other person knows something about synergetics and is interested in applying it. Indeed, use of these techniques while interacting with another syngeneer may quickly lead to a synergic relationship in which each helps the other to operate on the broad band. For this reason, these techniques are described here, although they properly belong in the field of Group Synergetics.

These techniques are not new-they have always been available to you, and no doubt you have used them on occasion. They do, however, promote synergy. And their habitual use, as part of a life-style, helps the individual function regularly in the synergic mode, using the broad band.

1. Affinity make. In the course of relations with another human being, aspects of his action or being periodically emerge for which one feels affinity. This is true of most of the people one encounters. Each of us has so many facets that some are bound to be “likeable.”

When such affinity is felt, express it. This action is an affinity make. When it is done, both parties feel better and a surge of synergy occurs.

Two important qualifications should be noted:

a. An affinity make is primarily expressed by action, not words. It can be by a look or a gesture. Of course, a verbal statement is a form of action and is often the simplest way to do it, but it is more the way it is said than the explicit content that makes the flow of affinity. An example: “I hate you,” said in an affectionately jocular manner.

b. It must be genuine. Most people are aware of the power of flattery and are pretty good at detecting it. Whether detected or not, flattery does not promote synergy. This is not stated as an ethical judgment, but as an observation of human beings in action.

Opportunities for affinity makes are constantly occurring. But there is so much dysergy in the world that these opportunities are often overlooked. Yet an affinity make is a powerful synergy generator.

2. Empathy make. This consists essentially of the operation: “Put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes.” This does not mean doing so from your viewpoint and values, but from his viewpoint and values. It is not necessary to accept his viewpoint and values, merely to understand them and to see how events and situations look from his perspective.

An empathy make has several values:

a. Each human being is like a walking, talking library, with years of experience, data, and know-how different from yours. It is always possible to learn from another human being, no matter how humble, no matter how great. An empathy make enables one to take advantage of this opportunity.
b. An empathy make promotes affinity, mutual understanding, and effectiveness of communication.

c. An empathy make develops the ability to see things from a variety of perspectives simultaneously. It turns on the multiordinal mode. From this, it is a small additional step to the synergic mode.

3. Semantic telepathy. Affinity and empathy makes help one to communicate with others in a synergic team with remarkable effectiveness. We refer to such
communications as “semantic telepathy.” (The word “telepathy” is used here not in the usual sense of “direct thought transference” but in the sense of nonverbal communication of meaning.)

Consider two individuals, Mr. A and Ms. B. Mr. A has an idea that he wishes to communicate. He first of all encodes the idea into words and speaks the words. Ms. B hears the words and decodes the message. If all goes well, the idea she gets will be the same as Mr. A’s. When this happens, we say that semantic communion has been achieved. Semantic communion does not necessarily mean agreement, merely understanding.

Semantic communion is the primary goal of communication, and one can use a variety of means other than the verbal message to achieve it. The set of these other means constitutes semantic telepathy. The receiver, for example, may make a deliberate effort to predict the message. One way to do this is to follow the rule: “Focus on what he means, not what he says.” As soon as she gets the message, she calls out “clear,” and Mr. A immediately ends the verbal message.

The sender, in framing the verbal message, uses empathy makes in order to state the idea in terms that fit the perspective of the receiver. He is continuously aware that the same word may have different meanings to different people or even to the same person at different times. Since semantic communion is the goal he does not insist on the “correctness” of his meaning, but accepts hers.
If the idea is abstract, such differences of word meaning may be considerable. So he follows the natural movement of the mind, in which a concrete perceptual experience usually precedes an abstraction from that experience, and begins with a concrete presentation that readily evokes semantic communion, and then moves to the abstraction, rather than first stating the abstraction.

One very useful technique is called bridging The sender evaluates areas of agreement he has with the receiver, and separates these from areas of difference of outlook, disagreement, or conflict. He then uses the area of agreement as a bridge through which to transmit his message, A good rule here is: “Pick an agreement with her.”

A frequent obstacle to semantic communion is the existence of a distinction made by the sender but not by the receiver (or vice versa). This is a source of confusion. The idea of empathy, for example, may imply or include the concept of sympathy to the receiver, whereas for the sender these are two somewhat similar but distinct ideas. Whoever makes the distinction is best able to communicate it.

Another obstacle is an apparent agreement that obscures the fact that semantic communion has not really been achieved. The receiver may nod agreement because the verbal message evokes a clear picture in her mind, not realizing that the picture is not the same as that of the sender. This can be minimized by a policy of not taking semantic communion for granted, a policy adopted by both sender and receiver. Semantic communion can be checked by the sender using a concrete illustration of the message he has sent, or by the receiver repeating the message in her own words. The mere cognizance of the possibility of this source of confusion minimizes the probability of its occurring.

There are other purposes of communication besides semantic communion such as achieving agreement, persuading the receiver to accept an idea or to do something, or simply to convey affinity (or rejection or some other state of relationship). But, for most of these, semantic communion is prerequisite. It is indeed remarkable that despite the tremendous expansion of the physical means for communication — telephone, mimeograph or other forms of replication, radio and TV, etc. — semantic communion is so often not achieved. Misunderstanding piles upon misunderstanding, and affinity and empathy go down, with a concomitant rise in mistrust, hostility, and conflict. While such failure to achieve semantic communion is by no means the only cause of human problems, it is a major cause of many and a contributing cause of most.

4. Synapse. Affinity makes and empathy makes can be used with anyone. So can semantic telepathy, but it is much more effective when done by two syngeneers. When each party knowingly focuses on semantic communion as the goal of communication, the interchange of information and the degree of trust and rapport can reach remarkable heights. And as this occurs, a step beyond semantic telepathy becomes feasible.

Any message tells far more than it says. Surrounding the explicit statement-what the message says-there is a network of plausible inferences and connotations, the implicative residue. When semantic communion is rapidly and easily achieved, communication can be expanded by focusing on the implicative residue.

The basic rule of semantic telepathy is: “Focus on what he means, not what he says.”

The basic rule of synapse is: “Focus on the implications of what he means. ” It is a step beyond and much fun.

5. Franktalk refers to presentation without rancor of ideas or evaluations critical of the actions or viewpoints of another. An implicit convention governs franktalk. If this convention is broken, franktalk is ineffective and often counterproductive. It is therefore recommended that franktalk not be used unless one is sure that the convention holds. The convention is usually easy to establish by use of affinity makes or bridging (or both) beforehand.

The convention is simply neither to take offense nor to give it. If the sender “talks down” to the receiver, displays or feels hostility, shows an unwillingness to receive franktalk in return, etc., the convention is broken. If the receiver feels hurt, imputes unfriendly motives, or feels called upon to defend or justify, the convention is broken. The sender does not try to persuade; he simply presents for consideration. Similarly, the receiver accepts for consideration. That is all.

Franktalk gets behind the veneer of politeness we so often use to hide from one another. Among syngeneers, it can be highly effective and useful.

6. Totaltalk. This is an advanced mode of communication that emerges when the previously described synergic team functions are used so regularly that they form a synergic whole and when a broad band orientation has become characteristic. We can distinguish four channels:

 a. Mind-to-mind.
 b. Mind-to-whole.
 c. Whole-to-mind.
 d. Whole-to-whole.

In totaltalk, all four channels are used concomitantly. For example, one reads the mind band and uses it. Simultaneously, one reads

implicative residue, as much as one wishes. This can be done as a mind, consciously. It can also be done as a whole being, “knowingly.” By “knowingly” is meant the whole being analog of consciousness. But one should not be bound by this analogy. To “know” in this sense is “to-be-able-to-be-conscious-of-if-the-need-arises.” It is this, and more, but words fail. Get the feel?

It is possible to describe in greater detail the enormous variety of processes that go on in totaltalk. But a verbal description would take a whole book in itself and would still be inadequate. Instead, let us merely regard the four available channels, focus on the implicative residue, and let out minds go where they will.

One final word: ETC.

Human Synergetics

Reposted from Yes! Magazine.

A Time for NonViolence? 

Michael N. Nagler

Anyone who has seen Bowling for Columbine will recall the scene when Michael Moore is interviewing James Nichols, whose younger brother is in prison as an accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing. As Nichols raves on about the need to overthrow the government with force, Moore suddenly interjects, “What about Gandhi?” Stunned to silence, Nichols hears Moore say, “He threw out the British without firing a shot.” After a long pause, Nichols quietly answers, “I’m not familiar with that.” When I saw Bowling for Columbine in Berkeley, the whole audience gasped.

When I am asked, as I often am, “Can non-violence possibly work in times like these?” my answer is, “Can anything else?”

It is not that I am unaware of the problem. I know what right-wing radio talk-show hosts are doing to the minds of millions of people, how corporate forces are dehumanizing an entire civilization—and how this dehumanization is making itself felt in the streets of Baghdad and Gaza. Nor am I making a prediction; I have no idea how things will turn out. But I am optimistic about what could be, because I am aware of the yet-to-be-unleashed power in the human individual—the power of nonviolence—and because I am aware of how that power has been growing.

Jonathan Schell recently wrote that, despite a lot of noise to the contrary, the latter half of the 20th century saw brute force become increasingly futile and the power of the human will correspondingly more significant. This seems to me entirely correct. Despite, or in part because of, the appalling rise of violence, we are now experiencing the third wave of global nonviolence to uplift the modern world.

The first wave consisted of the struggles of Mahatma Gandhi, whose movement brought down a corrupt and outmoded imperial system, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose struggle uprooted an equally outmoded ideology of racialism.

The second wave was a rash of insurrectionary movements around the world, among them the defeat of dictator Pinochet in Chile, the “People Power” revolution in the Philippines, and the first Palestinian ‘intifada’ (shaking-off), which, while the follow-up has been thwarted, did lead to the Oslo peace accords. Various other ‘intifadas’ shrugged the Soviet mantle off Eastern Europe. While not all of these uprisings were nonviolent, many were, including in Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, whose 1968 “Prague Spring” uprising thwarted a Warsaw Pact repression for eight glorious months; the country later freed itself in a “Velvet Revolution.”

There were similarly popular and nonviolent uprisings elsewhere, along with less ambitious movements: The peasant-led struggle around Larzac, France, in the 1970s, thwarted government plans to enlarge an army base at the expense of grazing and farmland; European anti-nuclearism made the Green Party a force to reckon with, at least in Germany; and the Landless Rural Worker’s Movement has provided over a million Brazilians with land and new forms of self-sustaining community.

In all these varied movements, oppressed people discovered they could organize resistance against a seemingly invincible regime, delegitimate it in the eyes of the public, and precipitate its downfall. While some of these movements were violent—sometimes brutally so—as Schell said, the key to their victories against overwhelming military force was the commitment of a community’s will. A discovery had been made: physical force could be overpowered by will.

At the same time, will needs intelligence and strategy. Some of these movements began developing an art whose importance cannot be overstated: nonviolence training. As Gandhi said, the training for a satyagrahi, or nonviolent activist, has to be more rigorous than the training for a conventional soldier. Civil Rights activists in the 1960s used “hassle lines” and role playing to evoke and then control the anger and fear they would face on the marches, picket lines and sit-ins. Like soldiers learning to stay cool in combat by having guns trained on them, nonviolence trainees learn to stay cool while emotions are trained on them, and how to avoid triggering one’s opponents’ rage. Groups like Global Exchange and the Ruckus Society began to use this training in preparation for the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations in 1999, and harnessed the loose-knit, democratic “affinity group” structure, which first arose, appropriately, in the early struggles against fascism in Spain and was developed further in U.S. anti-nuclear campaigns.

We are now in the third wave of nonviolence, consisting of the world-wide movement against corporate globalization and, of course, the global anti-war movement that has sprung up with astonishing speed and effectiveness to meet the equally astonishing new arrogance of the U.S. government.

What marks this third wave is that it is self-consciously global and, while the movement may not yet have fully articulated a positive vision, the millions who turned out to oppose war were aware that they possessed a different kind of force from that of the world’s military powers. This dawning awareness that there is another kind of force strengthens the tendency to nonviolence. That will become clearer, I think, as both the militarism and the resistance wear on, confronting the world with a stark choice.

Violence undermines itself

When necessary, this is just what nonviolence does: It forces violence into the open, causing violent regimes to undergo the “paradox of repression,” increasing the naked force they must exert to maintain control until it is unacceptable—to the oppressed, to the community that must maintain the force, and to the watching world. The crushing to death of Rachel Corrie by an American-made bulldozer in Gaza last March might be forgotten in the focus on Iraq, but now two others from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Brian Avery and Tom Hurndall, have been shot. The very violence of the militarism that caused these crimes, especially in a time of global communications, will prove its undoing.

The power of nonviolence is insistently surfacing now, even where resistance movements seem to have lost sight of it. An image comes to mind from recent protests in San Francisco: tension was building along a street where a sprinkling of “black bloc” demonstrators were taunting the police, much to the dismay of the majority of protesters. At first no one noticed a Buddhist monk standing at the back of the crowd, but he slowly made his way forward (despite his own considerable fear, I learned later) and stood, a dramatic figure in yellow robes and shaved head, before each policeman in turn, smiling at him or her and bowing with folded hands. Even before he reached the Asian officer who involuntarily greeted him in turn, the tension had melted.

At the heart of nonviolent action is the power of the individual, a model for revolution expressed in Mother Teresa’s Bengali formula, ek ek ek (‘one by one by one’). Yet I have just been describing the growth of institutions of nonviolence. What has been discovered is that organizations can be designed to draw forth the energy and creativity of the individual, rather than suppress them as cogs in the corporate machine. This is democracy in the deepest sense.

Among the structures that are building on the power of each individual is the Nonviolent Peaceforce (which I reported on in YES! Fall 2002), which plans an international army of nonviolence.

The ISM, too, even as some of its members have died, has been demonstrating the power of moral courage and clear vision. Jennifer Kuiper, who was in Palestine with the ISM when the recent killings of internationals occurred, said, “We aren’t simply fighting against violence but for an alternative vision of the world. A world that rejects weapons in favor of intellect and heart. If we can’t imagine it, how can we create it? If we don’t create it, how will we transform our dreams into substance? If not us, then whom?”

In a Native American story that has become current of late, a grandfather tells his grandson that two wolves are battling inside him; one ferocious and destructive, the other gentle and powerful. When the child anxiously asks, “Grandfather, which of them will win?” he replies, “Whichever one I feed.”

Gandhi and King’s movements roused the hidden power of the downtrodden, leading to a wave of insurrections against specific regimes. Over time, awareness of this power has percolated through the globe, spreading exponentially faster as communications grew, until now we have reached a global awareness of nonviolence and of the interconnectedness of global problems that I’m calling the third wave. It presents us with a hope and a challenge. If the first two waves showed that communities united in will could overcome brute force, the third wave shows a tantalizing vision of what the whole world community, united in will, could achieve.

As Robert Muller has said, there is not one superpower in the world today, but two: the militarized United States on the one hand, and the millions of ordinary people, including many Americans, who yearn to devote their energies to a humane future. Which will win? Militarism, with its thinly disguised imperial agenda, or the awakening power of human will and consciousness? Fear or love? If we feed the new awareness of nonviolent action, with its spiritual dimension, its focus on empowering individuals, its grassroots forms of organizing, and the knowledge that each of us possesses what Gandhi called “the greatest force humankind has been endowed with,” there is no question that it will be love.

©2001-2003 Positive Futures

A major division of synergic science is the study of human intelligence. Many are familar with R. Buckminster Fuller who studied synergy in physical universe. Previously, I featured an article on human responsiblity by N. Arthur Coulter who studied synergy in human intelligence.

The following article is reposted from Future Positive, February 2002.

Vectors of Human Intelligence

Timothy Wilken, MD

In my search to understand human intelligence, I have discovered seven states of mind that when accomplished increase human intelligence, they are:  calmness, awareness, synergy, validation, motivation, adaptability & responsibility.

CALMNESS —def—> The ability to process information without physiological response.  

An individual who has mastered calmness knows that all internal thinking is symbolic. If my body responds to every thought of danger let alone every real danger, then I will truly come to know the meaning of the sentence: “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one.”

Today most of us die a thousand deaths. When we imagine our problems and stresses, our bodies tense and strain. When we think of danger, we feel afraid. When we think of hurt, we feel anger. The feelings of anger and fear are just our internal sensings of our bodies as they prepare to fight or flee. But when our bodies prepare to fight and flee, they shut down vital systems.

If these systems are shut down for more than a few moments, we shorten our lives and become sick. In a world of chronically frighted and chronically angered individuals, all our lives are shortened, and all of us are sick.

In our modern world, calmness is a survival skill. Calmness is the ability to think of danger and hurt without feeling fear or anger. Calmness is ability to process information without physiological response.

AWARENESS —def—>  What I know of the whole / Total known about the whole

Awareness is a variable of knowing. It applies to the all phenomena in universe. Some examples of increasing awareness are: A newborn baby has minimal awareness, not even responding to his own hands and feet. A child is usually only aware of self. A good mother carries an awareness that includes her children and husband. A good manager will carry an awareness of his entire department. A scientist seeking peace may carry an awareness of six billion other humans.

Awareness —def—>         Who I know 
                                            All living on earth 

Awareness means that when I decide, I have considered all I am aware of. So another way of thinking about awareness is: The child’s decisions concern only himself. The mother’s decisions considers not only her needs, but the needs  of her children and husband as well. The manager’s decisions considers the needs of everyone in his department. And the scientist’s decisions considers the needs of six billion other humans.

SYNERGY—def—> The WIN-WIN relationship.

It is when a relationship is good for me and good for you— it is when we both benefit from the relationship.

The Primary retardent to efficiency, productivity, and quality of life is CONFLICT. Synergy is the elimination of conflict. Synergy is the win-win relationship.  

VALIDATION—def—> The human state of feeling approved of. 

It involves both self-approval and other-approval. An ideal state is when an individual has both self-respect and other-respect.

Approval is frequently hard to come by in our present world. All humans experience numerous and frequent episodes of disapproval. This produces what I call validation damage. This damage  produces humans who are highly polarized in terms of validation.

Some individuals seek only other-approval getting nearly all their validation by pleasing others. Within their relationships they are most concerned about  other’s needs. Their posture may help other win, but often self is ignored and loses—lose/win.

These strongly other-validating individuals tend to be oversensitive and underconfident. These individuals tend to fail when they need self.

Another large group of individuals seek only self-approval getting nearly all of their validation by pleasing self. They are most concerned about self’s needs. Their posture may help self win, but often other is ignored and loses—win/lose.

These strongly self-validating individuals tend to be undersensitive and overconfident. These individuals tend to fail when they need other.

Optimization occurs when an individual becomes balanced. Seeking his validation needs by seeking both self-approval and other-approval. He seeks a relationship with other that is good for both self and other. This posture may help both self and other to win—win-win. These balanced validating individuals tend to be both sensitive and confident. These individuals tend to succeed.  Validation is the human state of feeling approved of.  

 MOTIVATION —def—>The strength of the urge seeking action.

The strength of ones motivation is a primary determinant of success. Dual Mind Theory sees Motivation resulting from both the Space-mind’s desires and the Time-mind’s goals. Space-mind is motivated by an attraction to fun and pleasure, and a repulsion from pain. Time-mind is motivated by  attraction to meaning and a repulsion from boredom.

The human mind is most interested on those tasks that it finds both entertaining and meaningful. Applied to education, the most powerful forms of instruction are entertaining and educating. This is producing a new approach to instruction called “EDUTAINMENT”.
 
Motivation is best when my life is enjoyable and meaningful—fun and interesting. One lesson we can learn from motivation is that when what we are doing isn’t fun and interesting, then we should make changes until it is fun and interesting. Motivation is the strength of the urge seeking action.

 ADAPTABILITY—def—>Ready, able, and willing to change.   

An individual with 100% adaptability lives what he knows. The highly adaptive individual is always seeking to adjust himself to optimize his relationship with reality. He lives what he knows, if he knows cigarette smoking is unhealthy, he chooses not to smoke.

In a universe that is always changing adaptability is of great value. It involves a sensitivity to change. Adaptability is being ready, able and willing to change.  

 RESPONSIBILITY—def—> The ability to respond—Response Able. 

 This requires an individual to accept the consequences of his actions or non-actions—to accept the risks and benefits and consequences of those actions not for himself, but on all others as well. Responsibility is the ability to respond.

The greatest productivity occurs in an environment that is highly supportive of these vectors of human intelligence — calmness, awareness, synergy, validation, motivation,  adaptability & responsibility.