Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

George Dyson has the rare skill of being able to put flesh on ideas. He is particularly good at Samuel Butler(evoked in the title essay) and a few Darwins: Erasmus (a great character and, we learn here, Mary Shelly's inspiration for Dr. Frankenstein), his grandson Charles (Origin of Species), and brief mention of Charles' grandson Sir Charles Darwin (who headed the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) which employed Alan Turing, but was unable to gain support for Turing's project to build an "Automatic Computing Engine" in 1945). Selected against.The Chapter on Butler is worth the price of the book. Readers will also encounter many obscure names brought alive with interesting detail and then fit into the evolution of a familiar technology. For example, Dyson explains how wooden tally sticks, used as a primitive, secure means of record keeping in the English (twelfth century) pre-history of banking, both facilitated the establishment of a banking system and served as an early precursor and model for encryption keys.Familiar, iconographic names, Charles Babbage and John Von Neuman, to name just two examples, are shown in somewhat different, and more human, light than they are usually presented. Babbage, for example, was a prophet of telecommunications whose early ideas for what we now call packet switching revolutionized the British mail system. Babbage analyzed the operations of the British postal system and found that its costs were governed more by switching than by distance. His recommendaton of a flat rate service was introduced in 1840 as the penny post. Von Neuman's influence is described in detail in many places, for his contributions to mathematics, game theory, computing, the Cold War defense system, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.Students looking for a concise description of the history of "distributed communication" (most familiarly now the Internet) will also find a great and amusing chapter in this book. Dyson has written a remarkably compact description of how the issues and concerns of the defense establishment encouraged the creation of what we now know as the Internet.The boundlessness of the book, its avoidance of the shelter of one or a few strict disciplines, is among its greatest attractions. If anyone ever asks you what a liberal arts education is, point them to this book. There is no better book on how ideas live and grow across generations. Darwin Among the Machines is science writing, intellectual history, personal essay, and more.

Who is going to listen to Dyson's preaching? His religion is a very sad one because it makes human beings feel very small. A book to be read like good wine, a little bit at a time with many breaks to think about what one has read.

This book was really extraordinary to read. Dyson correctly approaches digital evolution and delivers expansive and well thought theories. Really thought provoking and well laid out. While the prose is difficult sometimes the ideas burn through it and communicate some very powerful ideas that still bounce around my head months after reading it. The exploration of macro-consiousness in the economy and the world-wide network were really enlightening and almost unsettling.

Wow! What a bunch of excellent reviews! They all provide excellent information. That won't stop me from entering my own review, but I will present it in the form of a self-test. Answer questions for the intended reader (IR) of the book.1. Does the IR have one or more books relating to Science with the word "fuzzy" in the title?2. Does the IR describe time sitting in front of the computer as "fun"?3. Does the IR cite Gödel's theorem at recreational gatherings?4. Does the IR have both a cellular phone and a Personal Digital Assistant?5. Does the IR cite evolutionary theory as an explanation for everyday phenomena?6. Is the IR a member of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace and a regular reader of one of the following: Scientific American, Nature, Science, or Technology Review?7. Does the IR regularly read Discover magazine and is a college graduate (or equivalent autodidact)?I think you get the idea. If "yes" is the answer to one or more of the above, this book should be a hit. If you said "yes" to three or more, this book is a must have!

Those of us who have spent more than a few years with computers have read a great many books about the history of computing, and they seem, for the most part to be of the "kings and battles" school of history writing: Long lists of men and machines that convey the image of computing history as strictly an additive process, in which advancement is due to improvments in the low-level technology of the hardware. Thus the 1940s and 50s are summed up as the era of tubve computing, the 1980s become the era of the microprocessor and so on. We're also given a few names to spice up the narrative. Babbage makes the obligatory appearance, as do Turing, Von Neumann and Grace Murray Hopper. But Dyson presents a very different approach. Rather than concentrating on the machines that are the exemplars of computing technology at any given time, he chooses to concentrate on the philisophical assumptions that underly the philosophy of computing at a given time, as well as how the availible technology and economics dictated how that philosophy was to be realized. At the same time, he gives us a story about the evolution of life on earth, and the interplay between theories of life, and theories of computing. Not an easy trick to pull off, and yet Dyson's narrative is both rigorous in its science, and compelling as a story. Most histories of computing begin with the abacus, or some other tallying device, the natural consequence of seeing computers as simply larger and faster arithmatic engines. Even those who begin the story with Babbage tend to focus on the notion of Babbage's machine as a device for calculation, despite the obligatory quote from Lady Ada Lovelace about the potential of the caclulating engine for purely symbolic computing. But Dyson begins his narrative in an unexpected place- Hobbe's Leviathan. For Dyson, Leviathan is the first theory of the emergent properties of complex systems, as well as the first theory of how reliable systems can be built from unrelaible componants- a theory as applicable to biological evolution as it is to the problems of vaccum tube based computers of the 1950s or to the studies and simulations of complex systems that gained so much momentum in the 1980s and 90s. The questions raised are traced both through their impact on computing and on biology. Dyson introduces us to the brilliant and mostoly forgotton work of Baricelli in creating a numerically based "artificial life", reasearch that was going on at the Institute for Advanced Study while Dyson was a child growing up on the grounds. Dyson also brings a new clarity to the evolutionary debate. As he explains it, the question is not between a theory of creationism relying on faith and evolution relying on evidence; it's much more subtle and complex. We actaully have three possibilities: Design from without, design from within, and selection from random processes. The former is nominally the creationist position, but it's also the position of such people as Rupert