[Paleopsych] Howard Bloom: Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-biotic Evolution
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Howard Bloom: Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-biotic Evolution
PhysicaPlus - Online magazine of the Israel Physical Society
http://physicaplus.org.il/view_eng1.html
Abstract
Hamilton, Trivers, and their successors made brilliant contributions
to scientific insight. But it's time to put the selfish gene in its
place. Evolution is less dependent on genetic difference and
similarity than is generally perceived. In fact, evolution's most
potent trait--the genesis of novelty--depends less than is usually
imagined on organism and life. DNA replication is but a special case
of something that began with the big bang-- the Xerox Effect--the
tendency of this cosmos to cough up copies in almost infinite
abundance. Natural selection--the need to fit the environment's
constraints--appeared in the Big Bang's earliest nanoseconds.
Evolutionarily Stable Strategies have flourished since the first
quarks joined in triumvirates. Variation and competition arose between
gaseous macro-clusters long before the first ignition of the stars.
Even proto-sociality and large-scale networking are long-standing
cosmic legacies. Hamiltonian arithmetic is based on shared heritage,
on family. When viewed in terms of protons, suns, and macromolecules,
all bioforms are cousins in a single family tree. Planets, dust, and
life-forms are all children of the Big Bang. Every living microbe,
plant, or animal on Earth is a cousin in the clan of DNA. Every
organism that ever was is a relative of its antagonists, of its food,
and of the inanimate forces of complexifigenesis and catastrophe. A
new way of framing questions and answers emerges when one sees
Darwinism, the arithmetic of self interest, and the patterns of the
human psyche in the broader context sketched by cosmology,
astrophysics, particle physics, microbiology, and paleontology. In
this light, it's time to reevaluate. What traits have we inherited
from previous forms of life, and what traits have been bequeathed us
by our pre-biotic ancestry?
[view\howard_front.jpg]
Astronomers refer to the heart of galaxies as nuclei. Is this an
appropriate use of biology's vocabulary? Or, to put it differently,
which aggregation of billions of constituent elements evolved the
principle of central control we call nucleation first-galaxies or
cells?
Can A Cosmos Evolve?
Evolution is a term used constantly these days by a breed of
scientists who seldom if ever deal with the stuff of
life-cosmologists, physicists, astrophysicists, and astronomers. They
use it to refer to galaxies, suns, and stars. The word "evolution"
appears 191,787 times in NASA's Astrophysics Data System, The Digital
Library for Physics, Astrophysics, and Instrumentation hosted by the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In other words,
physicists and astrophysicists use the word evolution almost four
times as often as they use the word "planet" (58,001 times).
Are today's "hard scientists" applying the concept of evolution
metaphorically? Are they misappropriating and misusing a term that
rightfully belongs to only one form of cosmic interaction-the complex
tangle we call life? No, Not at all.
Evolution depends on four factors-reproduction, competition,
variation, and natural selection. All four factors existed in some
form in the pre-biotic universe. All four started their twisting long
before life began.
The universe started with a Big Bang, not a whimper. Most of us
acknowledge that by now. What few of us realize is the capacity for
duplication that this universe revealed literally within the first
nano-flash of a second after its conception. The cosmos sprang from a
convergence of infinities, a twist of crisscrossed nothings physicists
call a singularity. A sliver of a second later more than 1088 protons
popped into being. Every one of these protons, no matter where or when
it had appeared, was identical to every other-totally interchangeable.
The same duplication happened with neutrons, electrons, positrons, and
photons-or as the early families of particles are known-with all
baryons and leptons. Swarms so numerous they defy the human number
system cascaded from a spreading sheet of space, time, and energy. All
paid tribute to a dead-ringer-generating, identimorphic process of
uncanny precision, a process churning out the very same pattern almost
everyplace there was a place to be. Was this reproduction? No proton,
so far as modern theory knows, ever begat another proton. Nor was this
copycat imitation-the mechanism to which theorists like Susan
Blakemore attribute the reproduction of memes. In our terms it was
parallel or convergent evolution.
Evolution-isn't that an inappropriate, vitalistic term for the
primordial plasma of an abiotic cosmos--one that wouldn't host a hint
of life for another eleven billion years? The mistake, it seems, is
made by the biocentric. Once again, evolution's essence as Charles
Darwin saw it boils down to reproduction, variation, competition, and
natural selection. Only one of these-reproduction--is a biological
monopoly. And even that is a shade less clear-cut than it seems. Let's
examine the pre-biotic cosmos for evolution's remaining trio, its
triad of propulsive algorithms--variation, competition, and natural
selection--one element at a time.
Natural Selection in the Primordial Stew
We have strong hints that natural selection has been with us since the
earliest second of the Big Bang. Modern physics regards a universe as
the product of a set of laws tweaked by roughly 20 variables. What are
natural laws? They dictate the way things can and cannot be. Violate
the elemental laws, and you can't succeed. Even if you get away with
overstepping the bounds for a picosecond or two, other products of
natural law may eradicate you. As of 1999, atom smashers had generated
roughly 300 forms of hopeful monsters-subatomic particles. Most
disappeared within a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Only a
handful could survive the rigors of this particular cosmos at this
point in time.
This destruction of what doesn't fit is the ultimate punishment for
"unnatural" crime. It's also the severest form of natural selection.
What if the flash of the Big Bang had topped a particle accelerator in
inanimate variation, in abiotic fecundity? What if it had precipitated
3,000, or three million hopeful genera of particles in its crack-up
splat of energy? How many of these early species of proto-matter have
survived the fourteen billion years or so since the instant that
kick-started time? Only 72. These 72 have made their way through a
slew of natural selection's slings and arrows unparalleled by anything
that breathes. They've endured the catastrophe of cosmic expansion,
the disasters of galactic recompression, the eruption of
stellar-center hells, the frigid chill of space, collision, contusion,
explosion, intrusion, and the vagaries of ten billion years more time
than any thing that ever rose from a mere twitch of RNA.
Natural selection worked with extreme ferocity in the first
nanoseconds of the Big Bang and in the 300,000 years that followed.
The cataclysm physicist Alan Guth refers to as expansion hit with a
force that dwarfs the torment at the heart of a nuclear blast.
Compression waves repeatedly crushed would-be particles together in a
squeeze that makes the mash at the heart of our sun seem like a day at
the beach. The heat was beyond belief-it reached 1028 degrees Kelvin,
1021 degrees hotter than the heart of the sun. Heat is a measure of
speed. Which means that nanobits of primordial matter slammed each
other with a destructive force that makes a collision of bullets seem
like a polite meeting of snails for tea.
Only 72 forms of elementary particle survived these
ricochet-collisions.
Only 72 abiotic species made it through this natural selectivity.
Even in this harshest of environments, the Xerox Principle worked its
ways. Social aggregations by the sesquiviginquintillions gathered in
identical patterns and showed their power to stay. They emerged as
what Maynard Smith calls Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. The
triumphant micro-communities were protons, neutrons, and mesons.
· Protons were trios of a down quark and two up quarks.
· Neutrons had the opposite population-one up quark and two down.
· Mesons were quark duos-quarks in bonded pairs.
Despite crashes, smashes, violations, and attacks of outrageous kinds,
these huddles of two and three have remained together since the first
ten minutes of time. That's a form of fitness far beyond anything
biomass has yet achieved. But perhaps these aggregations' strangest
quality was is its strict adherence to precision and to the Xerox
Principle-to identicality.
Do Particles Socialize?
Another form of congregation made it through the brutal natural
selectors that both early and recent environments tossed their way. A
duplicative rain of neutrons precipitated in uncountable numbers
during the first slice of a second that formed the cosmos' first EEA.
Anthropocentric as it sounds, these neutrons were subjected to a
critical social need. A neutron that paired with a proton could last
almost eternally. A neutron that failed to find a proton partner in
10.6 minutes was doomed to disintegrate permanently. The forces of
physics had literally built an apoptotic timer-a self-destruct
mechanism-an internal selector-into these wee monads of pre-life. The
result? Three forms of nano-tribe or inanimate micro-family-
· Huddles of one or two neutrons around a single proton (progenitors
of deuterium and tritium)
· Clutches of two protons accompanied by one or two neutrons (the
ancestors of helium)
· And clenches of three protons flanked by four neutrons (the future
cores of lithium).
These monomorphic social coveys, too, made it through the slam-dance
jam that physicists call plasma-the superheated smash-em-up that
filled the exploding space-time manifold like quivering molten lava
for its first 300,000 years. These duos and foursomes showed a power
to succeed despite the pounding natural selection meted out even to
pre-biotic breeds.
Variation-The Formal Dance of Difference
[view\howard3.jpg]
A proton is a very social place. According to one current theory, a
proton is a trio of quarks (left). According to another, it's more
like a crowd of students in a phone booth-containing not only a quark
threesome, but a pack of gluons and quark-antiquark pairs. More to the
point, despite the proton's intricacy, the early universe spat out
10^88 identical protons in less than a second. This cosmic habit of
spontaneous-and often simultaneous--duplication is The Xerox Effect.
Then there's variation, the force of evolution Darwin admired the most
and found it hardest to comprehend. That too appeared in the Big
Bang's pre-biotic burst. Differentiation carved a chasm Between highly
distinctive forms:
· The matter-stuff called baryons (protons, neutrons, and their
anti-matter counterparts)
· The smaller matter-bits called leptons (electrons, muons, tau
particles, electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos)
· And the force-carriers, the radiating, transporting, binding, and
repelling particles (some of which are still quite
hypothetical)-photons, gluons, W and Z particles, and gravitons.
Tossing another twist of variation into the early mix was yet another
cleavage between kinds. This separation, this variation, is based on
something we in psychology think of as a property that only biomass
possesses-behavior, stimulus and response, action based on who's
around you and on what your environment cues you to do. Fermions
follow one rulebook of inanimate etiquette-that mapped out by
Fermi-Dirac statistics. The cosmic directive fermions obey with strict
obedience is this: if one fermion discovers that a nearby other has
occupied a given quantum state, it may not crowd into the same quantum
niche staked out by its companion. Instead it must assume a different
quantum position.
The counterparts of fermions are bosons. These follow a different set
of social do's and don'ts. The imperatives of bosons are described by
Bose?Einstein statistics. These say that a flock of bosons can hop
into the same quantum state and crowd together there quite
comfortably.
The stimulus-response proclivities of fermions and bosons would not
reveal their choreography until the universe was 300,000 years old.
But with these social rules there would arise yet another critical
evolutionary engine-competition. For at the year 300,000 ABB (After
the Big Bang) the environment altered, and it altered drastically.
Things cleared up and things slowed down. This was the second cosmic
EEA. The scalding soup of bump-and-bash spread out. Particles
downshifted from a slashing speed to a relative mosey of energy. Space
opened in between the trios, duos, and quartets that formerly had
crowded in a mash. Photons were no longer trapped in ricochet and for
the first time were able to discover their propensity to travel in
straight lines. When humans would probe the cosmos fourteen billion
years later, they'd sense these straight streams of photons as a
subtle radiation, a glow that warms but sheds no light.
Bosons were suddenly moved by new social cues. Protons found
themselves reeled in by a force of a kind that had never shown itself
in quite this way before. They were tugged toward nano-bits one
1,800th their mass. And those tiny particles, electrons, responded to
the tugging too. This led to a new circle-dance, a new form of
nano-tribe or family. Electrons settled into shells around
proton/neutron cores. And these orbiting electrons, being fermions,
were polite to each other. No two crowded into the same quantum state.
They aggregated yet kept a proper distance, revealing their obedience
to the rules of inanimate politesse later traced by the mathematical
courtesies mapped by Fermi and Dirac.
Thus did particles discover something observers-had there been
some--would have found unbelievable. They gathered in the inanimate
community we now take for granted and call "atoms." Once again, the
Xerox Principle held sway. More identical gang-ups sprang up than our
words for numbers-from trillions and octillions to duodecillians-can
conveniently convey. And they did so not just one-by-one, but yoked in
simultaneity.
If this were a random universe, innumerable social bundlings should
have taken place-particle circles of five, ten, 20, or 30 protons and
their neutron sidekicks. Theoretically there should have been mixes
and matches-permutations and combinations-of all kinds. On the other
hand, if this were the disintegrative universe of the entropists or
the progress-less cosmos of the late Stephen Jay Gould, there should
have been no social bundlings at all. But for the next few hundred
million years, six and only six cluster patterns would thrive in the
co-evolving environment of their time. Only six would be generated by
what Darwin labeled "variation." Only six would be favored by
inanimate duplication. And only six would make it through the sieves
of natural selection. The lucky winners were:
1. The perpetual swing of a single electron around a single proton-a
tango held together by inanimate fascination. This is the particle
dance that we call hydrogen. Add a neutron to the center and the
swirl's deuterium. Put a second neutron in, and the frisk is tritium.
2. The swish of two electron circlers around the pivot of two protons
and one or two neutrons. These are the particle gavottes we know as
helium.
3. The whip of three electrons around a hub of three protons and four
neutrons. This is the whisk called lithium.
So evolutionarily stable were two of these atom-strategies, so mighty
were their powers to overcome potential destroyers like the harsh
smack of gamma rays, so hardened to bombardments of natural
selectors-- that hydrogen and helium atoms passed the ultimate test of
fitness-they make up 98% of the matter in this cosmos to this day.
Gravity Triggers Competition-Big Eat Small
Communal intersects of behaviors-of influenced-actions-were behind the
startling new emergent properties atoms would display. Since this
universe began there had been a mere three forces on display: the
strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic. Yet there was
another great bond-maker, one so weak that in the thickness of a
plasma it had never once revealed its possibilities. To an observer
accustomed to what nature had been like for 300,000 years, it would
have seemed a myth, a ghost, a fairy tale, a fantasy. This new
emergent power would add to the Darwinian pistons of variation and
selection another crucial evolutionary driver-competition. The force
that slowly unveiled its strength now that the cosmos had calmed down
a bit was the weakest of the four repellers and compellers. It was the
subtlest, yet the grandest of the basic socializers--gravity.
Atoms existed but not substances. How could this be? No tug had yet
emerged to pull atoms together in a wisp, a tad of dust, a heap. Let's
put it bluntly. Without groups, there would have been no gravitational
influence. And without gravity, there would have been no atom mobs, no
atom crowds and aggregations, and nothing to compete about.
Cannibalism is the word astrophysicists and cosmologists use to
describe the new, competitive gravity game. Numbers were power-the
more recruits you could attract, the more reinforcements you could
dragoon. If your loosely flowing flock of hydrogen or helium atoms had
more mass than that of a neighboring gas, you could swallow the wisp
whole and add it to your atom congregation. If the multitude of atoms
in your dust speck outnumbered the host in a rival fleck, you could
haul in the less-populated squad then consume it using gravity's
traction beam. The larger you got, the more neighbors you could
attract or shanghai into your pack. When the big felt the attraction
of the small, the large swept in the tiny and took all.
When wisps and specks were still brand new, the predatory impact of
their gravity would have seemed a piffle. But as atom-masses grew they
changed the face of darkness, space and time. Long trails of queer,
phantasm-stuff-matter-- threaded through the black of time and space.
Where they crossed they battled to survive each others' tug. Some hung
together through sheer compromise. They swung in ellipses and spirals
around fattening hubs of gravitational stuff, protected by their
speed-by centrifugal force. They discovered yet another evolutionarily
stable survival tactic-orbit-a stratagem whose loops speckled the
cosmic map.
[view\howard4.jpg]
An act of what astrophysicists call galactic "cannibalism" and
"predation."
This was the compromise. The atom-clots that stayed intact as circling
captives added their tug to their motion-master's center of gravity.
They upped the grasping power of the globular giant at the heart of
their orbital course.
The larger the gatherings of circlers and swallowers, the more new
niches gravity carved out, and the more new forms and shapes its
marauding masses showed. The globular atom-legions that reeled in
rival squadrons turned to disks and whorls. Pinprick specks evolved as
pinwheels 100,000 light years across. These were the cinder-dark
swirls of atoms we call galaxies. Groups of these megadishes duked it
out for dominance. Tens of billions of galaxies were drawn together in
superclusters that continue to attract and gorge on weaker neighbors
to this day. Competing clusters swept the space between them in their
capture-matches. This lateral inhibition gave the new clumps spacing.
The mega-shapes of circle-laced-with circle turned into an
astro-froth, a bubble-stuff of mega-foam whose particles are galaxies.
Gravitational sumo matches re-landscaped the flat plain of Einsteinian
space/time. They gouged and raised the Van-Gogh patterns in our
night-time sky. Gravity was the great aggregator, the great
integrator, the great pattern-maker of inanimate sociality. But as yet
the sky was dark. Cosmic evolution hadn't yet discovered the secret of
the spark.
FIRE!
Variation is a word too tame when something like surprise pops up and
changes the very nature of the self-assembling game. The crowding of
atoms in the winning gravity centers created an atom smash. Gravity
balls grown overfat ignited. They stripped their atom-inhabitants of
electrons, mashed proton-neutron groups together-and forced these
tortured families of particles to let go of energy. The loss flooded
out as photons, and the radiating scatter of debris made light.
Roughly 200 hundred million years after the Big Bang, gravity's
variation, natural selection, and competition had pricked through
nature's blackness and had caused stars to ignite.
The Xerox effect-mass duplication-continued to adhere. The hulks that
cracked their atoms and spilled photonic refugees were suns. Evolution
cookie-cut them by the zillions, each in the shape of a sphere. The
swirls in which hundreds of billions of suns were wheeled together by
gravity were so profoundly similar that they're easily seen as
galaxies. Thousands of herds of galaxies were corralled by gravity.
Yet despite their fantastic number, these clusters had a disk-shaped
contour that remained at heart the same. Stars, galaxies, and galaxy
clusters all are evolutionarily stable strategies. All have proven
their ability to endure nature's nightmares, her selectors, her
evolution-honers, her gestation razors. All have triumphed over an
environment of star-eat-star and galaxy-eat-galaxy. And all have
trillions of lookalikes. All have doppelgangers to the nth degree.
[view\howard5.jpg]
A foam of galaxies. The spaces opened in this lace by
gravitationally-powered lateral inhibition are between 60,000,000 to
150,000,000 light-years across.
Cosmic Death, Birth, and Transfiguration
Repetition remained the rule for the next six billion years. Then once
again the force Darwin calls variation coughed up a saltative change.
Stars spun through developmental phases--youth, maturity, and,
finally, old age. The leaping, rebel-jamming, atom-slam that powered
stars ran out of energy. The liquid-like inferno at many a star's
heart was squeezed. The core of the star shrunk down, grew cold, and
balled up like a fist. Atomic nuclei at the heart grew sluggish and
lost the energy to keep their distance, to stay apart. The stellar
death-grip multiplied density and, in the presence of trapped nuclei,
gave that old attractive force new emergent properties.
Catastrophe is opportunity in the world of evolution. Destruction
spreads the seeds of new construction. During the years before the
first stars died there had only been three basic atom-forms-hydrogen,
helium, and lithium. All star-power, no matter where, had come from
munching on hydrogen and helium nuclei. The stellar death-squeeze
forced these ancient proton-neutron families to accept new social
norms, to reluctantly ally in 89 new tribal forms. Four protons forced
together would be beryllium. Five protons tortured to unite would be
boron. Six would be a wonder at match-making-carbon. Seven would be
carbon's eventual sidekick, nitrogen. Eighty-eight would be the
strange and flickery clan called radium.
These were proton-neutron tribes created in the midst of supernova
devastation. They were huddles, social strategies that would prove
their stability in the worst starburst catastrophe this cosmos could
toss at them. They were victors on the battlefield of natural
selection.
The Xerox Effect-synchronicity, duplicative-evolution-the pre-biotic
cousin of reproduction-still reigned. So much creativity, and yet so
little change. So much novelty and yet so much constraint. Eighty-nine
new atom-centers...yet in a world of 1077 protons, so few. Why for
every new atomic core would there be roughly 1055 carbon copies, 1055
dupes?
While old stars were dying, new stars were aborning-evolving by the
trillions, yet self-assembling so identically they were
indistinguishable as sheep. Star-wannabes self-seeded in patches where
the matter-scraps were plenty, and battled nearby rivals
gravitationally. Each scoured the dead-star bone yard for
more-than-its-fair-share of debris. In the clutter that they sucked up
there was something new--a smattering of the novel newborn atoms.
These were the 89 freshly-scrunched crews of protons and of
neutrons-the new elements the rules of duplicative generation,
competition, gravitation, and selection had sutured in new forms of
sociality.
In the new stars' wakes, inanimate evolution produced another newness
unknown in this cosmos' first few hundred million (and possibly even
billion) years-radical new molecules. Raucous jumbles of
atom-combinations explored their possibilities. They spat out
biomolecules in multitudes, the product of chance and of emergent
opportunity. Yet hydrogen and helium were still the rule. Hydrogen and
helium, the oldsters in the evolutionary match of slam, crash,
join-together, and dance, have shown a hardiness, a fitness, an
ability to take on comers of all kinds and stick together. They are
still 98% of all we know as gas and matter.
The epoch of new-star-and-matter-birth was the third great era of the
EEA. All throughout the cosmos nucleic acids, ammonia, and sugars
crystallized on spicules of amorphous ice, clumped in
slush-and-dustball comets, and discovered their fraternity while
mix-and-matching in the stuff of meteorites. Without replication there
was iteration. Carbon-copy molecules precipitated with precise
identicality billions of light years from each other in the emptiness
of space. If any found a planet or a moon with liquid water they could
do a dance of conjugation and gather in a bubble, in an empty pocket
that invited filling. Yes, when plunked into a puddle of water,
meteorite-born polyols, dihydroxyacetones, glycerols, sugar acids, and
sugar alcohols automatically swarm together in the lipid-like-bubble
we now call a membrane.
Self-Replicating Dust?
On one planet that we know of, these new proton-neutron-and-electron
aggregations flocked in yet far larger mass confederations-complex,
varied, polyglotted atom-leagues, knotted ropes of atoms stitched by
strange affinities. Repetitious cables of atom-squadrons seduced and
recruited nitrogenous and hydrogenous outriders to join on their
periphery. These were the shockingly "unnatural" new mass behaviors,
the whole new ways of hanging out together, the whole new strategies
in which particles by the millions joined to make it through a rain of
insults-heat and ice balls, ultraviolet rays, the shock of
planetesimals splattering the globe on which they rode, and high-speed
particles slammed down from space. In the flick of less than 750
million years, these new strings, new tangles, rings, and triangles of
particles uncovered a bizarre new opportunity-the ability to fuse and
flicker in the huge self-replicating armies of atom-scavengers that we
call DNA. Every living creature, from bacteria to salamander and to
all of us now in this room-is a child of this history. We are the
offspring of this self-creating, self-evolving cosmos that's crawled
upward despite the grand disintegrator, entropy. We are mounds of
quarks in trios, we are proton-and-electron families.
We are children of a repetition, an iterative churning that
cookie-cuttered with identical precision long before there was a thing
called breathing or the spasm of 100 trillion human cells we call a
sneeze.
[view\howard6.jpg]
Fission and fusion started in the big bang. They appeared in the
formation of baryons, in the disintegration of neutrons, in the birth
of proto-galaxies, and in the ignition and death of stars. They've led
to aggregations as small as protons and atoms and as large as galaxy
superclusters. Fission and fusion also took place among biomolecules,
bacteria, plants, animals, and human clans, and led to aggregations as
small as proteins and as large as empires and nations. Which first
pioneered fission and fusion strategies--protons and galaxies, or
bacteria, chimps, and human beings?
Are fission and fusion examples of evolutionarily stable strategies,
or are they simply sloppy similes?
(Illustrations clockwise from upper left: nuclear fission, the fission
of The United States of America from its parent body, Britain, a
moment of fusion among chimpanzees, and a moment of fusion between two
clusters containing several thousand galaxies.)
We Are Family-Cousins In The Clan of DNA
Evolution has crept forward since the first twitch of inflation from a
singularity. And so have social strategies. We are the Big Bang's
children. We are containers of the Xerox Principle's legacy. There is
only one life-process on this planet, not the 30 or 3,000 we'd expect
if evolution had proceeded in blind randomness. This cosmos can create
but is constrained. There are only 92 natural forms of atoms, not the
millions that a random cosmos would gestate. There is but a single
family on this planet, just one life form stretching out its tendrils,
testing possibilities as dust and stars did once upon a time. Face it;
we are all in this together, microbes, seaweed, starfish, salamanders,
humans, every strange extrusion of nucleic acid chains. We are the kin
of yeast, the brothers of cockroaches, the sisters of sugar beets, and
the cousins of maize. We share a common birthright born of ancient
gene-and-membrane teams. All of us are children in the clan of DNA.
_________________________________________________________________
Suggested further reading:
Among other things NASA's Astrophysics Data System provides a
reference to the 35 top journals in astrophysics and astronomy. The
NASA Astrophysics Data System: The Digital Library for Physics,
Astrophysics, and Instrumentation Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. From the World Wide Web:
[2]http://adsabs.harvard.edu
[3]Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the
21st Century
Lee Smolin, "The Life of the Cosmos", New York: Oxford University
Press (1997)
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer",
Santa Barbara: Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of
California (1997) Retrieved June 1999 from the World Wide Web:
[4]http://www.clark.net/pub/ogas/evolution/EVPSYCH_primer.htm
Edward L. Wright, "Brief History of the Universe", Astronomy
Department, UCLA Retrieved May, 2002, from the World Wide Web:
[5]http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBhistory.html
Peter Coles, "The end of the old model Universe", Nature, 393, 741 -
744 (1998)
Jack O. Burns, "Stormy Weather in Galaxy Clusters", Science, Vol. 280,
No. 5362, 400 - 404 (1998)
J. L. Bada, "The transition from abiotic to biotic chemistry: When and
where?" American Geophysical Union, abstract #U51A-11 (2001)
_________________________________________________________________
About the Author:
Howard Bloom ([6]howard at paleopsych.com), a visiting scholar at the
Graduate Psychology Department at New York University and a Faculty
Member, The Graduate Institute, is the author of two books: The
Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History
("mesmerizing"-The Washington Post) and Global Brain: The Evolution of
Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century ("reassuring and
sobering"-The New Yorker). This article is derived from one of his
upcoming books, The Big Bang Tango: Quarking In the Social Cosmos.
Bloom is the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project,
executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board
member of the Epic of Evolution Society, a founding board member, The
Darwin Project, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the
National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American
Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The
International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political
Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who's Who in Science
and Engineering since the publication's inception. Bloom's writings
have appeared in The Washington Post, Wired, Knight-Ridder's Financial
News Service, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, Omni Magazine, New
Ideas in Psychology, The Independent Scholar, Across Species
Comparisons and Psychopathology, and in two book series: Research in
Biopolitics and the Disinformation Company's series of three books:
You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know is Wrong, and Abuse Your
Illusions.
References
1. http://physicaplus.org.il/view_eng1.html#author
2. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/
3. http://howardbloom.net/Expert%20opinions%20on%20Global%20Brain.htm
4. http://www.clark.net/pub/ogas/evolution/EVPSYCH_primer.htm
5. http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBhistory.html
6. http://physicaplus.org.il/howard@paleopsych.com
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