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shane baker recommends...


Here is a book to add to your list -- Bloom, H., The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History, The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1995.


Bloom illustrates here a kind of "life eats life" scenario, incorporating
the far-reaching concepts of memes, the social "superorganism,"
self-organizing systems (autopoeisis, as applied to the social forces that
guide history), and the pecking order to put together "the big picture" of
how biology and sociology interact.

"Lucifer is the dark side of cosmic fecundity, the cutting blade of the
sculptor's knife.  Nature does not abhor evil; she embraces it... One
result: from our best qualities come our worst."  Very good stuff here --
Genocide and murder are merely tools for creation, bloody creation.  You may
have already run into this peice of work, but if not, i think it'd be worth
your time to consume it.

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Ant Allan recommends...

So let me recommend a book which is perhaps a little leftfield, but
will I think be of much interest to many Virions, not least because it
demonstrates the virtues of Reason and Vision! The book is David
Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality (Penguin 1998, ISBN 0-14-014690-3). To
quote from the blurb: DD presents "a startlingly integrated, rational
and optimistic world view that combines four strands: quantum physics
and the theories of knowledge, computation and evolution". It could
thus fit in many categories in the list! This is a truly enlightening
book: I have a Ph.D. in particle physics, but despite six years of
university study it was only when I read DD's book that I really
understood the fundamental reality described by quantum physics!

Another interesting book (but which may be less relevant) is Brian
Greene's The Elegant Universe (Vintage 2000, ISBN 0-099-28992-X) which
deals with superstrings and M-theory. I mention it because it speaks to
the parenthetical comments in Answers to Big Questions :: What is out
there? – i.e., that quarks are systems of superstrings; that our
universe is one of many in a multiverse, each created by collisions
between membranes in an 11-dimensional space!

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Also see InterestingBooks.
