Howard Bloom - The Lucifer Principle and Human Evolution

I love Howard Bloom's books, and The Lucifer Principle is the only one I have not yet read. Arthur posted this short video over at the I-I pod at Gaia/Zaadz.

The book has not been without controversy. Here is the entry at Wikipedia:

The Lucifer Principle (1995, ISBN 0871135329) is a book by Howard Bloom. It "explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture" and argues that "evil is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric".^[1] It sees violence as central to the creation of the 'superorganism'^[2] of society and the inevitable 'pecking orders' and hierarchies inherent in human social groups.

The book was criticized in a review in the Atlantic Monthly Press for ascribing moral notions such as 'good' and 'evil' to the essentially amoral world of nature. Other reviews^[3] saw it as 'ambitious' and 'disturbing' in its conclusions that societies based on individual freedom might succumb to systems such as communism or islamic fundamentalism.^{[4] [5]} The Washington Post said that "Readers will be mesmerized by the mirror Bloom holds to the human condition... He draws on a dozen years of research into a jungle of scholarly fields...and meticulously supports every bit of information...." while Chet Raymo in the Boston Globe termed it "a string of rhetorical firecrackers that challenge our many forms of self-righteousness."

Bloom later wrote^[6] that he and his publisher had been threatened by Islamic groups who objected to aspects of the book. He claimed that "Arab pressure groups asked ever so politely that The Lucifer Principle be withdrawn from print and that nothing that I write be published again. They offered to boycott my publisher's products — all of them — worldwide. And they backed their warning with a call for my punishment in seventeen Islamic countries." Bloom states that the Attorney for the Authors Guild wrote to his publishers, warning of an author boycott if the book was pulled from the shelves. The publishers asked Bloom to rewrite a chapter on Islamic violence, which led to the creation of 358 lines of footnotes attesting to the facts he presented within it.

Here are a few links, also from Wikipedia:

• Expert review of Howard K. Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
• Muslim protests against 'The Lucifer Principle'
• Interview with Howard Bloom - 'The Lucifer Principle' on BookTalk.org

Tags: Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle, superorganism, evolution, Science, anthropology, sociology, evil, creativity, nature