From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Mon Nov 05 2001 - 11:40:07 MST
> Some books that showed up on my Amazon recomendations list
> ...
> The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces
> of History by Howard K. Bloom
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0871136643/
> ...
> If anyone has read these and would like to offer comments,
> I for one would be interested.
I read this one; didn't seem worth the price of admission to me.
He basically makes one point--that some parts of history can best
be understood in terms of "superorganisms" of societies undergoing
memetic evolution--and then tries to shoehorn everything he sees
into that framework whether it really fits or not. He even goes so
far as to suggest that modern medicine just outcompeted homeopathy
memetically, totally ignoring the idea that it might actually have
succeeded because it works. The book does have lots of interesting
historical facts in it that are entertaining on their own if you
can look through his spin on them. All in all, though, I would
recommend that anyone thinking about this one would be better off
with Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel": he's pretty speculative
too in places, but he does his homework better.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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