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Beyond the Super Computer BEYOND THE Many scientists have been tempted to the characteristics of a shared hallucination. SUPERCOMPUTER: propose non-Hamiltonian approaches to the •Diversity generators spawn variety. Each activities within and the competition between SOCIAL GROUPS AS groups. For decades, these thinkers have been individual represents a hypothesis in the group mind. It is vital for the group's flexibility that it stopped by the quiet threat of exclusion from SELF-INVENTION professional respectability, expulsion from have numerous fallback positions in the form of MACHINES career advancement, and banishment from the individuals sufficiently different to provide possibility of academic tenure. approaches which, while they may not be by Howard Bloom However it is becoming increasingly necessary today, could prove vital tomorrow. obvious to a small group of heretics that a new This can easily be seen in the operation of one breed of evolutionary insights can emerge if one of nature's most superb learning machines, the In the new evolutionary disciplines there accepts the coexistence of both group and immune system. The immune system contains is a debate with major implications for the way individual selection. In other words, indications different antibody types, each a separate in which we view politics, citizenship, are that the social and biological sciences may conjecture about the nature of a potential emotions, health, ideology, and even the benefit enormously from a truce between the invader (Farmer et al., 1985: 188). However perceptual processes that produce a consensual Blefuscudians and the Lilliputians. diversity generators take on their most reality. In my book The Lucifer Principle: a intriguing dimensions among human beings. In one sense, the scientific argument resembles that between the Lilliputians and the scientific expedition into the forces of history •Next come the utility sorters. Utility sorters (Bloom, 1995), I've attempted to show the many Blefuscudians who, in Gulliver's Travels, ways in which we are both selfish competitors are systems which sift through individuals, warred over whether a breakfast egg should be and pawns of the social group. For example, favoring those whose contributions are most opened at the large or at the pointed end. The Lucifer Principle presents evidence that likely to be of value. These pitiless evaluators Dominating the field are individual selectionists, those who believe that the individuals are biologically wired as toss those whose presence represents excess expendable cells in a social "superorganism." baggage and faulty guesswork into biological, emergence of all behavior must be explained by The book goes on to contend that human groups psychological, and perceptual limbo. Some forms of self-interest which embody what follow the rules of dominance hierarchies utility sorters are external to the individual. But author Robert Wright, in his summation of "the uncovered by naturalists but normally applied a surprising number are internal. That is, they credo of the new paradigm," calls "head to head primarily to individuals. The Lucifer Principle are involuntary components of a being's competition" between individual genes and combines naturalists' observations with those of physiology. often between individual animals or humans psychoendocrinologists and others to shed new (Wright, 1985: 188). Group selectionists, on the other hand, are convinced that new evolutionary light on phenomena from the bickering of local •Fourth are the resource shifters. Successful learning machines shunt vast amounts of assets cliques to the machinations of nation-states and forms can emerge both from the battle for from the maneuvering of economic competitors to the individuals who show a sense of control personal advantage and from the competition to the butchery of armies. over the current social and external between social coalitions. But perhaps the best way to demonstrate environment. These same learning machines The formulae upon which individual selectionism rests were enunciated by biologist how far one can move if one accepts both cast individuals whose endowments seem extraneous into a state of relative deprivation. individual and group selection is to reveal one William Hamilton in the early 1960s. of the many potential approaches to a post- Christ captured the essence of the algorithm Hamilton's conclusions were based on an individual selectionist sociobiology. I propose when he observed "For he that hath, to him shall analysis of bees and other Hymenoptera. The to outline five elements which turn virtually be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be view that all behavior is ultimately based on self-interest had strongly taken hold. How, then, every form of social group--from a teenage taken even that which he hath" (Mark 4:25). gang to a multi-national culture--into a could one account for altruism? Hamilton collective intelligence, a complex adaptive •And bringing up the rear are intergroup focused on the selfless manner with which tournaments, battles which force each female worker bees sacrifice their reproductive system whose powers of perception and collective entity, each group brain, to continue invention both utilize and transcend those of the rights and chastely serve their queen. His individuals within it. Next I'll show how social churning out fresh innovations for the sake of triumph was a mathematical demonstration that groups at every level on the evolutionary ladder survival. Psychoneuroimmunologists have the workers were carrying essentially the same operate as group brains. Finally, I'll present found that we come complete at birth with a genes as the queen. Hence when an individual lived out her life on behalf of her monarch, she examples to suggest how the five principles can myriad of seemingly self-defeating and maladaptive physiological reactions. It is throw individual passions, mass mood swings, only appeared to be ignoring her own needs. geopolitics, fashion, fads, and health into currently fashionable to suppose that self- The genes she carried were closely related to surprising new perspective. destructive built-ins are misplaced leftovers those in the eggs laid by her mistress. By A great deal of work has been done since from our hunter-gatherer days. But there is an pampering the colony's egg-layer, each worker was coddling replicas of her own internal 1980 on complex adaptive systems--biological enormous amount of evidence that each of these and electronic learning machines. Most of this biological handicaps gives the group intellect a blueprint. Altruism, asserted Hamilton, was scholarship has taken mathematical form. competitive edge. In fact, there is good reason self-interest in disguise. Hamilton's ideas and those built upon However, it is possible to sum up a complex to believe that autonomic shut-down devices them have contributed mightily to our adaptive system's quintet of key elements help produce an even more positive byproduct: the constant enrichment of the environment, the entirely without equations. These elements are understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in (1) conformity enforcers, (2) diversity complexification of the planetary biomass. fields from psychology, medicine, and ecology generators, (3) utility sorters, (4) resource to the study of animals in the wild. But roughly twenty-five years after the shifters, and (5) intergroup tournaments. To understand how these five principles Hamiltonian epiphany, examination of real •Conformity enforcers impose sufficient affect you and me, it may be helpful to examine the workings of a group brain in an organism world bee colonies demonstrated that similarity on group members to give the social normally thought to have no intelligence at all: Hamilton's mathematics did not correspond structure coherence, relative permanence, and the bacterium. with fact. There was far more genetic variety in clusters of unselfish insects than the equations the ability to carry out large-scale, integrated, Continued on Page 44 multi-participant projects. would allow (Queller et al., 1988; Seeley, 1995: In humans, conformity enforcers lead, 7). Individuals were not abjuring their interests among other things, to a collective perception, a Visit simply to protect near-clones of their own socially constructed view of reality which genomic material. Apparently something else influences both childhood brain development HOWARD BLOOM was going on. Nonetheless, concepts based on and adult sensory processing, and which Online At what became known as the selfish gene produces a Weltanschauung displaying many of (Dawkins, 1976) are now dogma. www.howardbloom.net