Chapter one in
Global Brain by
Howard Bloom. 1st ed. Copyright 2000, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Bloom starts all the way back to approximately 12 Billion B.C. with the creation of the universe from "a submicroscopic pinpoint of false vacuum" (14). Although early parts of this chapter read like just about any scientific creation story, he quickly reaches a point that he will reiterate every few paragraphs for the rest of the text: bacteria are really good at networking. "There was no 'each woman for herself' in those deep, dark, early days. . . . A colony (of bacteria turned) into a collective processor . . . so ingenious that Eshel Ben-Jacob has called its modern bacterial counterpart a 'creative web' " (17). Because bacteria can replicate, and swap their DNA so easily, a bacterial colony is able to essentially hone itself to any environment by taking cues from other bacteria.
On to chapter 2: Networking in Paleontology's "Dark Ages"
Up to the Index.