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<div style="direction: ltr;"><font face="Verdana" size="2" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt;">Dear Howard and Colleagues,</font>
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<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">Many thanks for your contribution! This is the third time we have a New Year Lecture, and the first one devoted to humanities. Well, to the "inhumanities" should I say, as what you have
depicted succinctly with the Lucifer Principle describes the main evil that has been torturing human history. </div>
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<div><font face="Verdana" size="2"><font face="Tahoma" size="2">There are matters of detail to comment (as previous messages have already pointed out), but also of general perspective. First about the apparent simplicity. The LP scheme looks simple, too simple...
but </font>at the <font face="Tahoma" size="2">same time it may be powerful, really powerful in explanatory capabilities. I really do not particularly like any of the three components involved (super-organism, pecking order, meme/group-identity),</font></font><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">and
do not trust much about their respective "scientificity", </span><font face="Verdana" size="2">but their combination is chilling. It reminds some of the Marxian strictures about class </font><font face="Verdana">struggle, partially right but missing and transposing
essential ingredients of human life. Presumably some more objectivity i</font><font face="Verdana" size="2">n this case --but also missing some counterpart, say the "Archangel Principle", that has confronted and </font><font face="Verdana" size="2" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt;">resisted
the solvent forces of the Luciferian complex and, in the long trend, supported the complexity growth of societies and improved </font><font face="Verdana" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt;">their</font><font face="Verdana" size="2" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt;"> structural
decency. </font></div>
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<div><font><font size="2">With only the action of LP, history would not go beyond barbaric empires briefly raising from a mosaic of ever fighting tribes... That's plausible, and some parties may remind Tom Stonier in this list, late 90's I think, on warfare
as part of the adaption scenario of human evolution. Then, what could be the AP "bright forces" of history that have counteracted LP? The </font>Pantheon<font size="2"> of politheistic cultures could give a hint... I venture to single out </font></font><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: small;">three
components of AP: knowledge, justice, and the third... what about love/compassion? </span></div>
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 10pt;"><font face="Verdana" size="2"><br>
</font></div>
<div><font size="2"><font face="Tahoma" size="2" style="font-family: Verdana;">Anyhow, both the details of your LP scheme and the general canvas of human history need an informational perspective, we completely agree. And it is interesting that the whole trinity
of LP have biological/informational origins; but disentangling the info physics from the info bios has not been done yet (and so your final comment is </font><font face="Verdana">well intended</font><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><font face="Verdana"> but still </font>confusing
in my view)<font face="Verdana">. Let me ad, looking both at the achievements of our times and at the open intractable conflicts, that it is amazing the absence of a real international system of justice... </font></font></font></div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: small;">Discussing on justice, on its capability to social problem solving and to quench the LP permanent hunger, might not be a bad idea.</span></div>
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<div><font size="2"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><font face="Verdana">Best wishes to all for the New Year.</font></font></font></div>
<div><font size="2"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><font face="Verdana">--Pedro</font></font></font></div>
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<div id="divRpF851950" style="direction:ltr"><font face="Tahoma" size="2" color="#000000"><b>De:</b> Fis [fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es] en nombre de HowlBloom@aol.com [HowlBloom@aol.com]<br>
<b>Enviado el:</b> lunes, 04 de enero de 2016 6:45<br>
<b>Para:</b> fis@listas.unizar.es<br>
<b>Asunto:</b> [Fis] January Lecture--Information and the Forces of History<br>
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<div>The Force of History--Howard Bloom</div>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">In 1995, I published my first book, The Lucifer Principle: a Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of history.<span style="">
</span>It sold roughly 140,000 copies worldwide and is still selling.<span style="">
</span>Some people call it their Bible.<span style=""> </span>Others say that it was the book that predicted 9/11.<span style="">
</span>And less than two months ago, on November 13, 2015, some current readers said it was the book that explained ISIS’ attacks on Paris.<span style="">
</span>Why?<span style=""> </span>What are the forces of history?<span style="">
</span>And what do they have to do with information science?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">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<span style="">
</span>Empire in 201 BC <span style=""> </span>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.<span style="">
</span>The Lucifer Principle concludes that the passions that swirl, swizzle, and twirl history’s currents are a secular trinity.<span style="">
</span>What are that trinity’s three components?<span style=""> </span>The superorganism, the pecking order, and ideas.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">What’s a superorganism?<span style="">
</span>Your body is an organism. But it’s also a massive social gathering. <span style="">
</span>It’s composed of a hundred trillion cells.<span style=""> </span>Each of those cells is capable of living on its own.<span style="">
</span>Yet your body survives thanks to the existence of a collective identity—a you.<span style="">
</span>In 1911,<a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[i]</span></span></span></span></a>
Harvard biologist William Morton Wheeler noticed that ant colonies pull off the same trick.<span style="">
</span>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.<span style="">
</span>Wheeler observed how the colony behaved as if it were a single organism.<span style="">
</span>He called the result a “superorganism.”<a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">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.<span style=""> </span>By the time he was ready to write his PhD dissertation in 1918, Ebbe had close to 20 years of data.<span style="">
</span>And that data demonstrated something strange.<span style=""> </span>Chickens in a barnyard are not egalitarian.<span style="">
</span>They have a strict hierarchy.<span style=""> </span>At the top is a chicken who gets special privileges.<span style="">
</span>All others step aside when she goes to the trough.<span style=""> </span>
She is the first to eat.<span style=""> </span>And she can peck any other chicken in the group.<span style="">
</span>Then comes chicken number two.<span style=""> </span>She is the second to eat.<span style="">
</span>And she can peck anyone in the flock with one notable exception.<span style="">
</span>She cannot peck the top chicken.<span style=""> </span>Then comes chicken number three, chicken number four, and so on.<span style="">
</span>Each one cannot peck the chickens above her on the social ladder.<span style="">
</span>But each has free rein to peck the chickens below.<span style=""> </span>
Finally, there’s the bottom chicken, a chicken everyone is free to peck but who is free to peck no one.<span style="">
</span>Ebbe called this a “peck order,” a pecking order, a dominance hierarchy.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">And in 1976, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined two new terms.<a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="">
</span>He observed that biological life, all of it from bacteria to bathing beauties, depends on the evolution<span style="">
</span>of what Dawkins called “replicators,” molecules that can make copies of themselves. Then Dawkins spotted a newer kind of replicator at work.<span style="">
</span>The first biological replicators—genes--did their thing in primordial puddles.<span style="">
</span>The new replicator worked in a puddle of a radically different kind—the puddle of the human mind.<span style="">
</span>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.
<span style=""> </span>But the most important replicators in the soup of the human mind are not pop songs, they’re ideas.<span style="">
</span>Dawkins called these mind-based replicators “memes.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">Superorganism, the pecking order, and ideas—memes--that’s the holy trinity of The Lucifer Principle.<span style="">
</span>That’s the holy trinity that drives the forces of history.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">Here’s how it works.<span style="">
</span>Social groups compete.<span style=""> </span>They battle for pecking order position in a hierarchy of groups.<span style="">
</span>They strive to be at the top of that hierarchy and to avoid the fate of the chicken at the bottom.<span style="">
</span>What’s the main thing over which groups compete?<span style=""> </span>It’s a badge of group membership.<span style="">
</span>A badge of what molecular biologist Luis Villarreal and philosopher Guenther Witzany call “group identity.”<a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[iv]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="">
</span>That badge?<span style=""> </span>A cluster of memes. A knot of replicators that live in a sea of minds.<span style="">
</span>The Babylonians competed with the Assyrians and the Medes.<span style="">
</span>They competed using different languages.<span style=""> </span>They competed using different ideas of what clothes to wear, what was right and wrong, and, most important, what gods to worship.<a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[v]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="">
</span>The eight states that made war in China in from 475 BC to 221 BC also had competing languages, religions, and philosophies.<span style="">
</span>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.<span style="">
</span>And today militant<span style=""> </span>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<span style="">
</span>of Islam.<span style=""> </span>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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt">Pecking order competitions between groups, pecking order competitions based on ideas, are the meat and potatoes of the headlines.<span style="">
</span>They are the forces of history.</p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin:0in 0in 0pt">Where does information come into this?<span style="">
</span>Everywhere.<span style=""> </span>A fact that we shall have to discuss.<span style="">
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"> </p>
<span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">Why?<span style="">
</span>Because communication, sociality, and information exchange are at the very heart of this cosmos.<span style="">
</span>So are competition and hierarchy.<span style=""> </span>Not to mention the ancestor of superorganism-ness, the foremother of group identity—the cosmos’ obsession with mobs, gangs, flocks, and massively integrated social entities.
<span style=""> </span>Social entities that range from protons, atoms, galaxies, stars, planets and moons to galaxy superclusters.<span style="">
</span>What do all of these things have in common? <span style=""> </span>What do they share with megamolecules, DNA, cells, and bacterial colonies, not to mention ants, nations, and ISIS?
<span style=""> </span>Competition, hierarchy, and group identity.<span style="">
</span>Superorganism, pecking order, and ideas—the holy trinity of the<span style="">
</span>Lucifer Principle.<span style=""> </span>And guess what else they share?<span style="">
</span>Information!</span><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"> </font>
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<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[i]</span></span></span></span></a>
Jürgen Tautz, The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism, Berlin: Springer, 2008, p. 3,.</p>
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<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a>
William Morton Wheeler, The Termitodoxa, Or Biology And Society, The Scientific Monthly, February, 1920.</p>
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<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a>
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.</p>
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<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[iv]</span></span></span></span></a>
Luis P. Villarreal, <span style=""> </span>Origin of Group Identity: Viruses, Addiction and Cooperation,
<span style=""> </span>New York: Springer, 2009.</p>
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<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><a title="" href="file:///C:/cnt/the%20new%20forces%20of%20history%20for%20pedro%20marijuna%20and%20the%20foundations%20of%20information%20science%2012-24-2015.docx#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="" target="_blank"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-size:10pt; font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height:115%">[v]</span></span></span></span></a>
For more on the battle of the gods in Mesopotamia, see Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016.</p>
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<div><font lang="0" size="2" face="Century Gothic">____________<br>
Howard Bloom<br>
Author of: <i>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History</i> ("mesmerizing"-<i>The Washington Post</i>),<br>
<i>Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century</i> ("reassuring and sobering"-<i>The New Yorker)</i>,<br>
<i>The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism</i> ("A tremendously enjoyable book." James Fallows, National Correspondent,
<i>The Atlantic</i>),<br>
<i>The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates</i> ("Bloom's argument will rock your world." Barbara Ehrenreich),<br>
<i>How I Accidentally Started the Sixties</i> ("Wow! Whew! Wild!<br>
Wonderful!" Timothy Leary), and<br>
<i>The Mohammed Code</i> ("A terrifying book…the best book I've read on Islam." David Swindle,<i> PJ Media</i>).<br>
www.howardbloom.net<br>
Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Former Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University.<br>
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; Founder, Space Development Steering Committee; Founder: The Group Selection Squad; Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society; Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project; Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media
Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology, Scientific Advisory
Board Member, Lifeboat Foundation; Editorial Board Member, Journal of Space Philosophy; Board member and member of Board of Governors, National Space Society.</font><font lang="0" color="#000000" size="2" face="Verdana"><br>
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