[Fis] Forces of History

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Howard,

 

It seems to me that the term “supra-organism” could improve on “super-organism” 
given also the connotations of the latter phrasing (“Du bist nichts, dein Volk 
ist alles.”). The competition is in terms of phenotypes and not genotypes.

 

Here’s how it works.  Social groups compete.  They battle for pecking order 
position in a hierarchy of groups.  They strive to be at the top of that 
hierarchy and to avoid the fate of the chicken at the bottom.  What’s the main 
thing over which groups compete?  It’s a badge of group membership.  A badge of 
what molecular biologist Luis Villarreal and philosopher Guenther Witzany call 
“group identity.”[iv]  That badge?  A cluster of memes. A knot of replicators 
that live in a sea of minds.  The Babylonians competed with the Assyrians and 
the Medes.  They competed using different languages.  They competed using 
different ideas of what clothes to wear, what was right and wrong, and, most 
important, what gods to worship.[v]  The eight states that made war in China in 
from 475 BC to 221 BC also had competing languages, religions, and 
philosophies.  Rome set itself against the Persian Empire using the same tools 
of group identity: a different language, a different clothing style, a 
different way of worship, and a different pantheon of gods-- different ideas.  
And today militant  Islam—in the form of the Islamic State and what’s left of 
al Qaeda--is pitting itself against the West, Russia, and China using the ideas 
 of Islam.  Using the words and deeds of Mohammed, words and deeds that are 
still making copies of themselves in new minds 1,384 years after Mohammed’s 
death.

Best,

Loet

  _  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel. +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-842239111

  l...@leydesdorff.net ;  
 http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Visiting Professor, ISTIC,   Beijing; 
Honorary Professor, SPRU,   University of 
Sussex; http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYJ 
 &hl=en  

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[Fis] Forces of History

[Marcus Abundis]

Hi Howard,

> Social groups compete. They battle for pecking order position in a
hierarchy of groups.<
Your chicken example seemed to be talking about behavior WITHIN groups,
where this (above) note seems to consider behavior BETWEEN groups – please
clarify? You see them as the same?

>From your brief essay it seems you imply that pecking order/status is
driven purely by memes. But then how do memes drive chicken behavior? If
memes are not involved, what is truly driving the pecking order, and how
does that then apply ACROSS systems/groups?

Your reference to conflicts around Islam include noting about differences
between Shia and Sunni sects . . . although the conflicts can easily apply
to establishing a type of pecking order.
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Re: [Fis] January Lecture--Information and the Forces of History . Scientific Simplicity.

[Jerry LR Chandler]

List:

Paraphrasing two scientists.

"Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy.”Isaac Newton

"As simple as possible, but not simpler."   A. Einstein

The meaning of Professor Bloom’s essay can be simplified.

This simple essay is an interpretation of history without either human values 
or virtues.

In today’s world, examples of the Bloom thesis are ISIS and a “public” 
organizations such as the NRA.

If brute force is the primary driver of human history, what is a second? or a 
third? and so forth?

What are the feedback and feedforward loops among the first, second, third, … 
usw., that generate humanness (by processing information in terms of values and 
virtues)?   

Cheers

Jerry



> On Jan 3, 2016, at 11:45 PM, howlbl...@aol.com wrote:
> 
>  
> The Force of History--Howard Bloom
>  
> In 1995, I published my first book, The Lucifer Principle: a Scientific 
> Expedition Into the Forces of history.  It sold roughly 140,000 copies 
> worldwide and is still selling.  Some people call it their Bible.  Others say 
> that it was the book that predicted 9/11.  And less than two months ago, on 
> November 13, 2015, some current readers said it was the book that explained 
> ISIS’ attacks on Paris.  Why?  What are the forces of history?  And what do 
> they have to do with information science?
> 
> The Lucifer Principle uses evolutionary biology, group selection, 
> neurobiology, immunology, microbiology, computer science, animal behavior, 
> and anthropology to probe mass passions, the passions that have powered 
> historical movements from the unification of China in 221 BC and the start of 
> the Roman  Empire in 201 BC  to the rise of the Empire of Islam in 634 AD and 
> that empire’s modern manifestations, the Islamic Revolutionary Republic of 
> Iran and ISIS, the Islamic State, a group intent on establishing a global 
> caliphate.  The Lucifer Principle concludes that the passions that swirl, 
> swizzle, and twirl history’s currents are a secular trinity.  What are that 
> trinity’s three components?  The superorganism, the pecking order, and ideas.
> 
> What’s a superorganism?  Your body is an organism. But it’s also a massive 
> social gathering.  It’s composed of a hundred trillion cells.  Each of those 
> cells is capable of living on its own.  Yet your body survives thanks to the 
> existence of a collective identity—a you.  In 1911,[i] 
> 
>  Harvard biologist William Morton Wheeler noticed that ant colonies pull off 
> the same trick.  From 20,000 to 36 million ants work together to create an 
> emergent property, a collective identity, the identity of a community, a 
> society, a colony, or a supercolony.  Wheeler observed how the colony behaved 
> as if it were a single organism.  He called the result a “superorganism.”[ii] 
> 
> Meanwhile in roughly 1900, when he was still a child, Norway’s Thorleif 
> Schjelderup Ebbe got into a strange habit: counting the number of pecks the 
> chickens in his family’s flock landed on each other and who pecked whom.  By 
> the time he was ready to write his PhD dissertation in 1918, Ebbe had close 
> to 20 years of data.  And that data demonstrated something strange.  Chickens 
> in a barnyard are not egalitarian.  They have a strict hierarchy.  At the top 
> is a chicken who gets special privileges.   All others step aside when she 
> goes to the trough.  She is the first to eat.  And she can peck any other 
> chicken in the group.  Then comes chicken number two.  She is the second to 
> eat.  And she can peck anyone in the flock with one notable exception.  She 
> cannot peck the top chicken.  Then comes chicken number three, chicken number 
> four, and so on.  Each one cannot peck the chickens above her on the social 
> ladder.  But each has free rein to peck the chickens below.  Finally, there’s 
> the bottom chicken, a chicken everyone is free to peck but who is free to 
> peck no one.  Ebbe called this a “peck order,” a pecking order, a dominance 
> hierarchy.
> 
> And in 1976, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined two new 
> terms.[iii] 
> 
>   He observed that biological life, all of it from bacteria to bathing 
> beauties, depends on the evolution  of what Dawkins called “replicators,” 
> molecules that can make copies of themselves. Then Dawkins spotted a newer 
> kind of replicator at work.  The first biological replicators—genes--did 
> their thing in primordial puddles.  The new replicator worked in a puddle of 
> a radically different kind—the puddle of the human mind.  Dawkins observed 
> that we see replicators at work when our mind fixates on a song we hate and 
> plays it over and over again, no matter how vigorously we wish it away. That 
> song is using our mind to make more copies of itself.  But the most important 
> replicators in the soup of the human mind are not pop songs, they’re ideas.  
> Dawkins called these mind-based replicators “memes.”
> 
> Superorganism, the pecking order, and ideas—mem

[Fis] JPBMB 2015 SI on Integral Biomathics: 3 free articles and reference link at ScienceDirect

[Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov]

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to share with you three out of 41 contributions to the 2015
Special Issue on Integral Biomathics focused on Life Sciences, Mathematics
and Phenomenological Philosophy
. They are
published in the Elsevier Journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular
Biology (JPBMB), Volume 119, Issue 3:

   1. *“Editorial”: *http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1SHN~I6VGOrAK,


   1. *“Yet another time about time… Part I: An Essay on the Phenomenology
   of Physical Time”*: http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1SAT6I6VGOr75,


   1. *“Integral Biomathics Reloaded: 2015”*:
   http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1SHN~I6VGOrAb.

The articles are available for* free access until February 16th, 2016*.
Please feel free to distribute the links to your community circles.

The entire list of contributions to this special issue can be downloaded
here

.

I wish you a peaceful and successful New Year 2016!

Plamen L. Simeonov


__ ___ ___

Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov
mobile:   +49.17.37.81.63.37
landline: +49.30.83.21.20.70
fax/ums: +49.30.48.49.88.26.4

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