Rating: 
Summary: Sociobiology: the beginnings of a grand unified theory?
Review: Thank you Howard Bloom! This is one of the most important books I have come across in decades of social reading. I see Robert Wright's _Nonzero_ and Bloom's book as companion pieces, and highly recommend both.
This book, I feel, may be pointing the way to a grand unified theory for the social sciences through the vehicles of sociobiology and cultural evolutionism. I have long felt, somewhat in common with John Gray (Straw Dogs) that many of the problems that social theorists and ordinary people have in understanding the human world result from our self-image as divided and separate from the rest of the natural world, somehow superior to the life flow that surrounds us [I disagree with Gray's agreement with mainstream historians that human societies rest in social equilibrium, and tend to feel along with Bloom/Wright that history has a shape and direction].
Bloom's thesis of the five principles of group selectionism (conformity enforcement, diversity generation, reward/punishment, judgment and intergroup tournaments) is easily understood. I find extremely helpful in understanding current events and the relationship of current crises to parallel events in history, our aboriginal past, and in relation to the natural world. There are situations in my own life that I understand better after reading this book and understanding that my fellow human companions are, like me, primates driven by ancient evolutionary drives held in common with most other vertebrates.
Bloom (and Robert Wright) hold a field-based (holistic) view that human society is only properly understood as part of the web of life. I believe that this perspective may in time lead to real ability to solve large-scale (or render to more manageable scale) some social problems, recognize other conditions as not problems at all but unavoidable circumstances, and understand where we are headed. Hopefully this will add a few percentage points to our chance of surviving the hard times ahead.
This field-based view of cultural evolutionism may finally give human beings a bridge to the other life kingdoms and to our own deep past, and thereby grant us a coherent vision of our future. This is my hope.
Rating: 
Summary: The Networked Grand Plan of Evolution
Review: This is a book that is hard to characterize. Its thesis is a radically novel interpretation of evolution. While all evolution writers agree that evolution just happens and permeates everything, Bloom sees evolution as warfare of strategies. The combatants are neither individuals, nor species, but cognitive strategies. The group with the better strategy dominates in the long term, even though different strategies have different outcomes in the short term.While the above description seems neither novel, nor appears to correspond to the book's title, Bloom's investigation of strategies shows that the winning strategies are networked. Whether bacteria, bees, or human societies, the successful ones have mechanisms for experimenting with different strategies and communicating the results to other members of the group. This strategy applies to expansions of the group, and allows the group, along with its strategies for experimentation and communication, to dominate. The situation is different when groups are threatened or attacked. Experimentation and communication give way to command and control. The trick is to have experimentation and communication survive during periods of threat. All this is supported by persuasive evidence from biology and history. Bloom sees the first bacteria developing collective strategies for foraging and expanding. Human societies follow the same pattern. From Sparta versus Athens and through the ages, the evolution of civilization often matches the pattern that Bloom points out. This point, however, is where the thesis fizzles out. After this spectacular buildup, I was ready for a dramatic ending. None was forthcoming. The competition of species has produced this networked and innovative human society, period. When we are threatened by other species, be it HIV or influenza, we defend ourselves mightily. What about the future? Will the tournaments for networking and innovation resume in their bloody forms, or will the civilized scientific dispute and innovation dominate? Although the book neither answers nor asks the forward-looking questions, the thesis is fascinating. By means of our networked society this is a thesis that should find fertile ground in minds that can put it to good use.
Rating:
Summary: This book makes one reevaluate the human condition.
Review: This is one of those books that you read a few paragraphs and then put it down and walk around and think about what you just read. Though complex in ways, I found I could explain and discuss it with low functioning students in high school who were very excited about the five concepts Bloom explores. I have recommended it to many others and though all do not agree with his theories, they all have been willing to spend time discussing the content. Good read.
| 
