History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2 (Chronology)

Product Description

`History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2` is the second volume of the most explosive and astounding tractate on history ever written - however, every theory it contains, no matter how unorthodox, is backed by rock solid scientific data. The book is easy and pleasant to read; it is well-illustrated, contains hundreds of charts, graphs and illustrations, copies of ancient manuscripts, and countless facts attesting to the falsity of the chronology used nowadays. You will be amazed to discover: - That the chronology universally accepted today and taken for granted is simply wrong; - That ALL methods of dating of ancient sources and artefacts known today are erroneous or non-exact; - That there is not a single document that could be reliably dated earlier than the XIth century; The Author refers to the Middle Ages as the Antiquity and proves mutual superimposition of the Second and the Third Roman Empire, both of which become identified as the respective kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Furthermore, he asserts that the famous reform of the Occidental Church in the XI century by Pope Gregory Hildebrand was the reflection of the XII century reforms of Byzantine emperor Andronicus who in his turn identifies with Jesus Christ. The Trojan war counted by Homer happened only as late as of the XIII century A.D. and the great poet actually lived in XIV century A.D. No stone in history of Antiquity is left unturned. Literally. This book is the beginning of a major correction to the chronology we live with.

Customer Reviews:

Check and see.......2007-06-21

I don't care what other people say of this book. Those affirmig it's fake, they hadn't ever read it. Or have some special reasons to do so. "Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see..." This book won't make you feel comfortable. It'll make you feel free. It'll make you feel you're "not the only one" to feel you'd been lied to for centuries.

Suprise! Suprise!.......2007-03-22

Here is a serie of books which turns "the whole world" upside down. I learned a lot of it and I hope that a new book from A.T. Fomenko will follow very quick. A absolute must for everybody who is interested in history or even a little bit from it.

Prescient St Augustine?.......2006-02-05

We can so far divide the New Chronology into the following three parts:

a) The verifiable theory that proves consensual chronology wrong with the aid of astronomy, statistics and mathematics;

b) The new chronology hypothesis based on a new understanding of known historical facts and the most likely logical explanation of the most obvious inconsistencies inherent in the official version of history;

c) The history conjectures, that is experimental historical reconstructions based on assumptions that the authors believe to make sense in the light of their research and linguistic parallels - void of ironclad factual support to date.

Fomenko's theory complies with the most rigid scientific standards as a whole:

It gives a coherent explanation of what we already know.

- It is consistent: independent lines of inquiry all lead to the same conclusion.

- The predictions it makes are confirmed empirically.

Fomenko goes by the following axioms:

- Chronology is the basis of history;

- Human evolution has always been linear, gradual and irreversible;

- The "cyclic" nature of human civilization is a myth, likewise all the gaps, duplicates, "dark ages" and "renaissances" that we know from consensual history;

- The accumulation of geographical knowledge as reflected in cartography is a gradual and irreversible process;

- The chronological distance between a given manuscript and the events described therein is proportional to the amount of distortions it contains;

- There is no "useless" information in authentic ancient sources.

Why the mainstream historians do not shower mathematician Academician Dr.Prof Fomenko with thanks and laurels?

The Russians:

Because Fomenko asserts that there was no such thing as the Tartar and Mongol invasion followed by three centuries of slavery, providing a formidable body of documental evidence to prove his assertion. The so-called "Tartars and Mongols" were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a bilingual state with Arabic spoken as freely as Russian. The ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities. The hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription (the recruitment being the so-called "blood tax"). Their "invasions" were punitive operations against the regions that attempted tax evasion. Fomenko proves that Russian history as we know it today is a blatant forgery concocted by a host of German scientists brought to Russia by the usurper dynasty of the Romanovs, whose ascension to the throne was the result of coup d'état, charged with the mission of making their reign look legitimate. Fomenko proves Ivan the Terrible to be a collation of four rulers, no less. They represented the two rival dynasties - the legitimate rulers and the ambitious upstarts. The winner took it all! Over some 30 years of controversy, Russian historians have made a most remarkable transition - they were initially accusing the young mathematician Fomenko of anticommunist dissident activity and attempts to deface the historical legacy of Soviet Russia; nowadays the middle-aged mathematician is accused of adhering to "pro-communist Russian nationalism" and defacing the proud historical legacy of Great Russia.

The Westerners:

Because Fomenko blows consensual Russian history to smithereens, successfully removing a crucial cornerstone from underneath the otherwise impeccable edifice of World History. Fomenko adds insult to injury, wiping out one by one the Ancient Rome (the foundation of Rome in Italy is dated to the XIV century A. D.), the Ancient Greece and its numerous poleis, which he identifies as the mediaeval crusader settlements on the territory of Greece, and the Ancient Egypt (the pyramids of Giza become dated to the XI-XV century A. D. and identified as the royal cemetery of the Global "Mongolian" Empire, no less). The civilization of the Ancient Egypt is irrefutably dated to the XII-XV century A. D. with the aid of the ancient Egyptian horoscopes cut in stone. He was the first one to decipher and date all such horoscopes, coming up with mediaeval dates in every case. English historians rage at the suggestion that the history of Ancient England was de facto a Byzantine import transplanted to the English soil by the fugitive Byzantine nobility. To reward the English historians who consider themselves the true scribes of World History, the cover of the present book portrays Tintoretto's Jesus Christ crucified on the Big Ben.

The Chinese:

Because Fomenko wipes out the Ancient History of China outright. No such thing. Full point. The compilation of the so-called Ancient Chinese History is reliably datable to the XVII-XVIII century only. It is perfectly recognizable as the Ancient European history, reworked and transcribed in hieroglyphs as yet another historical transplantation, this time performed on the Chinese soil by the loving Jesuit hands. The Chinese are the next in line to go berserk. Chinese history is inevitably bound to get both more ancient and more eventful, proportionally to the growing involvement of China in the world affairs. Chinese historians will keep on finding valid proof of prehistoric Chinese spaceflights until the Politburo orders them to shut up.

The Arabs:

Too bad. Islam with all its key figures is datable to XV-XVI century A. D. Arabic historians may find consolation in the crucial historical role of the Ottoman Empire in the XVI-XVII century. The trouble is that this empire was initially a Christian state, with Hagia Sophia identifiable as Temple of Solomon, according to Fomenko! We can only guess if the acquisition of Alexander the Great (a Macedonian and a Christian) as the founder of the Muslim World Empire will make Fomenko's theories more acceptable to the Arabic mainstream. He certainly does not spare any holy cows at all, claiming The Stone of Qa'Aba in Mecca to contain the lost Arch of the Covenant.

The Divinity:

Despite of reiterated statement that his theory is all about chronology and not Religion, Fomenko stirs up a whole condominium of wasp nests. His collection of anathemas, fatwa, and other condemnations from all parties concerned is already considerable. Little wonder, considering that the history of religions à la Fomenko looks as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the XI century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (XI-XII century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (XII-XVI century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, the Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and so on.

According to Fomenko we know strictly NOTHING about the events that predate the X century A. D.

St Augustin was prescient when he spoke unto us: "be wary of mathematicians, particularly when they speak the truth."

Something of a disappointment.......2005-09-09

After having read the first volume of this expected series of 7 volumes I was triggered by the thesis of these authors that ancient Greek and Roman history did in fact take place in the Middle Ages. So I started studying medieval history of the Middle East - also known as Islamic history - to find out if the opponents of the ancient Greeks and Romans - the Acheamenid Persians, Sassanids, Scythians, Egyptians, etc. - also have their duplicates in medieval history. My search was disappointing: none of the many medieval Islamic dynasties seemed to correspond to the ancient middle eastern rulers.

However, I did find a close correspondence between Herodotus' Persian kings and medieval events:

- the defeat and capture of an Anatolian king - the Lydian Croesus - by the Persian conqueror Cyrus is identical to the defeat and capture of another Anatolian king - sultan Bayezid - by the Asian/Mongol conqueror Tamerlane;
- the Persian conquest of Egypt by the cruel tyrant Cambyses reds almost exactly as the Ottoman conquest of Egypt by Selim the Grim (note the nickname!);
- Darius the Lawgiver of the Persian Empire looks very much alike to Sulayman the Magnificent, the Lawgiver in Islamic history;
- Xerxes, whose main claim to fame is to be defeated by the Greeks at the naval battle of Salamis, looks like Selim II (the Sot) whose main claim to fame is to be defeated by a Spanish-Italian alliance at the naval battle of Lepanto.

I should have expected Fomenko et al. to arrive at similar conclusions, however, they claim that the Persian kings are the alter egos of the Angevin kings of Sicily whose biographies do not contain the exploits of the Persian kings.

The similiarities I indicate lead to the conclusion that Herodotus must have written his Histories at the close of the 16th century. But this is extremely late, given that Herodotus is "the Father of History", so therefore all other "ancient" histories must have been fabricated even later. Yet, the founders of modern chronology - Scaliger and Petavius - laid their foundations also at the close of the 16th century and had the full corpus of ancient histories already at their disposal.

It seems to me that Fomenko has to address these inconsistencies, maybe in the forthcoming 5 volumes?

Another critique of their book is that the correspondencies between different rulers are often based on a superficial comparison of the biographies; upon a more thorough comparison many details appear that do not correspond at all.

Finally, the authors rely heavily on the works of Gregorovius (1821-1891!!) - his medieval histories of Rome and Athens - as the source of medieval history; these works are - at least in the West - hoplessly outdated and have been superceded by more up-to-date works (for instance, Julius Norwich's trilogy on Byzantine history is not even cited).

Romulus courts Helen, Paris founds Rome, Moses goes to Troy.........2005-07-30

If you agree with Fomenko that Roman chronology is basically the foundation of the entire edifice of global chronology; you would also certainly agree that despite its numerous gaps and inconsistencies, Roman history is the best-documented field of ancient history, and thus a reference scale. But how well is the actual date of the Eternal City's foundation known?

Firstly, Rome is supposed to have been founded by the Trojans who had to flee after the fall of Troy. Some claim Rome to have been founded by Aeneas and Ulysses shortly after Troy had fallen; others are of the opinion that there was an entire dynasty that ruled for 500 years between the fall of Troy and the foundation of Rome.

Well, that's just an innocent 500 years long misunderstanding compared with what heretic Fomenko says, asserts, proves in his second volume: Second Roman Empire, Third Roman Empire, Biblical Kingdom of Israel, Biblical Kingdom of Judah, Holy Roman Empire are stories about basically same events, written from different points of view at different times. The underlying events have actually taken place during xii-xv cy. These histories have been written and perfected by multitude of highly talented humanist and clerical writers of xiii-xvi cy disguised as "ancients" with glorious names like Homer, Pluto, Thucydides etc..Chronology 2.0 beta..

Historians are kindly invited to report the bugs.

The Templar Papers: Ancient Mysteries, Secret Societies, And the Holy Grail

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Ralls vrs Olsen
This Book is Balderdash!
More Templar Stories
The Templar Papers
SEVERAL "NEW" AUTHORS WITH "MORE OF THE STORY"!!

The Templar Papers: Ancient Mysteries, Secret Societies, And the Holy Grail
Oddvar Olsen
Manufacturer: New Page Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1564148637

Book Description

Much has been written about the group of 14th-century warrior monks known as the Knights Templar. Some authors, such as Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, portray them as folk heroes wrongly accused. Others disagree, saying the Templar story is ultimately one of greed, deception, and idolatry.

Just who were the Knights Templar? And what is their legacy?

In The Templar Papers, author and historian Oddvar Olsen has assembled a veritable Who's Who of experts to unravel the mystery. Instead of rehashing previous scholarship, this book delves into new aspects of Templar lore, such as the origins of the order and its supposed survival after 1314.

It attempts to answer the following:

• Were the Templars devil worshippers who venerated a mysterious head? • Was the head that of John the Baptist? • What exactly did they find in Solomon's Temple? • Did they keep, and later hide, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant?

You'll also discover the Templar link to Mary Magdalene and the Freemasons, including answers to questions such as:

• Were Jesus and Mary lovers or, in fact, husband and wife? • Did Mary give birth to a child after Jesus' death? • Did Freemasonry originate from the Templars?

The Templar Papers offers the inquisitive reader several lifetimes of research and insight. This is a distinctive and truly unique compilation that will stimulate your mind and settle the controversy.

Customer Reviews:

Ralls vrs Olsen.......2007-08-23

I didn't get a feeling that the authors answered the questions set out on the jacket to any great satisfaction. I definitely prefer reading Karen Ralls, as a scholarly author, rather than the popular history authors presented here.

This Book is Balderdash!.......2007-08-17

The fact that this author would even allude to the fact that Jesus and Mary were lover shows the lengths a person will go to get someone to buy the book. Because of this, readers should be aware that a lot of suppositions will be made by the author to tantalize but not educate. How can one trust what he/she is reading in this book? Only lovers of pure fiction will enjoy it because truth is lacking here.

More Templar Stories .......2007-06-30

For Templar buffs, the accumulation of the different
perspectives of this collection of author's theories is worth the read.

As in all books, there are kernels of truth. In reading this,
I gleaned some new concepts of the history of the Knights Templar.
Bettye Johnson,author, Secrets of the Magdalene Scrolls.

The Templar Papers.......2006-06-26

This is the 3rd book I have read on The Templars. The text is a hodge-podge of interesting facts and spectulations on The Knights Templar. The disorganization and disjointed style makes the information difficult to follow. There is entirely too much repetition and too many rhetorical questions in every chapter. There is virtually no chronologic order to the material. It would have been very helpful to the reader if the author provided a simple map to indicate the location of the many places, temples, churches etc. mentioned in the text. It was difficult to know without searching other references if the location of the place, incident, battle, or refuge referred to was in the Middle East(holy lands), France, SCotland or England!

In Chapter 6, one of the contributing authors(Defoe)gives a history of the Canadian Masonic Templars and later in the same chapter, R. Lomas, presents a brief history of Freemasonary. This was a bit perplexing and again, this underscores the disorganization of the text material.

Finally, given the problems that quickly become obvious to the reader, the editor must take some blame or responsibility for the poorly organized material of the text.

SEVERAL "NEW" AUTHORS WITH "MORE OF THE STORY"!!.......2006-04-25

The compiler of this book has to be commended for finding scholars with "more of the story"!! I was fascinated with the story of the "Roussillon Templars" as we have several of those ancestors including Alaric the Goth who brought the temple treasures of Jerusalem out of Rome and into that Visigoth territory around Roussillon. Nice to know that more details wiped out by the Inquisitions in that area is finally seeing the LIGHT OF DAY!! Researching the families who were especially persecuted does seem to help! The detail on Henry of Blois and his crucial connections with Glastonbury and Winchester 'developments' is also fascinating. Thanks to Karen Ralls and this compiler for helping us put this history together again!!! Let us hope we won't have to deny another "holocaust" again and can move forward in life respecting all peoples.

Amazon.com

In Figments of Reality, mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen's thesis (or schtick) is that human minds are produced by complicity between human brains and culture. In their earlier book The Collapse of Chaos, Stewart and Cohen used the power of Humpty Dumpty to redefine complicity to mean properties that emerge from the mutual interaction of complex systems. "Our minds, our societies, our cultures, and our global multiculture, are all evolving within a reality that we mould in images of our own creation. We are a figment of reality--but reality is increasingly a figment of us."

Reality is not the only figment in the book. Stewart and Cohen use a group of eight "weird alien beings from the planet Zarathustra, resembling fluffy yellow ostriches but with much stranger habits" as a sounding board, as comedy relief, and as a philosophical-experimental playpen. To quote:

"Ringmaster: What is this?
Liar-to-children [=teacher]: A continuing educational narrative of some kind, Ringmaster. Based upon a revered/reviled (delete whichever is inapplicable) ancient text. [Watches the screen and interprets the tale that unfolds--a long and dramatic story of an exploding universe, elements born in stars, complex carbon-based molecular machines, a doubly-helical genetic molecule, the origins of life, evolution, sense organs, brains, minds, and intelligence.]
R: What a fascinating narrative.
LtC: And such a convincing story.
Destroyer-of-facts [=scientist]: Such vigor and power! Such unified scientific insight!
R: Not a word out of place, no loose ends--amazing!
ALL: [In unison] Must be wrong, then."

Read it and think, read it and giggle, read it and come back for more. At long last, a worthy successor to Gödel, Escher, Bach, updated, twisted, and put through a Monty Python filter.

Book Description

Peppered with wit and controversial topics, this is a refreshing new look at the co-evolution of mind and culture. Bestselling authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (The Collapse of Chaos, 1994) eloquently argue that our minds evolved within an inextricable link with culture and language. They go beyond conventional views of the function and purpose of the mind to look at the ways that the mind is the response of an evolving brain that is constantly adjusting to a complex environment. Along the way they develop new and intriguing insights into the nature of evolution, science, and humanity that will challenge conventional views on consciousness. The esteemed authors tantalize the reader with these bold new outlooks while putting a revolutionary spin on such classic philosophical problems as the nature of free will and the essence of humanity. This clearly written and enjoyable book will inspire any educated reader to critically evaluate the existing notions of the nature of the human mind.

Customer Reviews:

Evolution of mind and human culture.......2004-04-15

While there is relatively little about the brain itself in this book, the authors do consider the importance of symmetries in neural processing. Thus, a discussion of the recognition of male and female faces takes advantage of an eigenvector (or eigenface) that embodies the difference between an average him and her. (Enthusiasts of the quantum mind approach to consciousness studies should note that such ideas are the coin of modern nonlinear science, and not at all dependent upon the extrapolation of quantum theory to the macroscopic world: a point that was clearly made by Niels Bohr back in 1933.)
Unfortunatly, there is no mention of recent research by Hermann Haken and his colleagues in connection with this work, although this sort of eigenvector analysis is closely related to ideas presented in his book Principles of Brain
Functioning (1996).

A short chapter on free will is interesting but ultimately somewhat disappointing because the authors seem to be sitting on both sides of the philosophical fence. Recognizing that the assumption of free will is necessary for the orderly functioning of any culture and scornful of the inflated claims of genetic determinists, they note that theoretical reasons can be imagined for anything that occurs. To me, at least, this is as true as it is unconvincing. It is always possible to cobble together some sort of explanation of whatever transpires after the fact. Does this imply that the future is determined by the present? What might such an assertion mean? This chapter ends with the statement: ``Therefore free will is not just an illusion: it is a figment rendered real by the evolutionary complicity of mind and culture'' (p.241). Maybe I am dense, but this doesn't mean much to me. Perhaps the authors would have been wiser to omit this chapter, admitting that they do not know what free will is.
Two final chapters deal with some of the details of our many interactions with the surrounding culture, noting that a very large amount of knowledge is presently available to us all through libraries, schools, theater, television, and more recently the World Wide Web. The first of these chapters, entitled Extelligence, considers in some detail the ever increasing pool of information in which we are embedded in by our technological culture. The authors consider their notion of extelligence to be somewhat different from (say) Karl Popper's World 3, because it involves complicit interactions with individuals in a culture. This is, in my view, such an extremely important aspect of the overall subject of consciousness studies, that it deserves a book of its own. Perhaps the authors will team up with an informed and imaginative ethnologist in the not too distant future and work on such a project. The last chapter - entitled ``Simplex, Complex, Multiplex'' - describes the relationships between the organization of biological cells and human social systems. From this perspective, the village is analogous to a bacterium, whereas a town is compared to an eukaryote, and a city to a multi-celled organism. The chapter title alludes to increasingly sophisticated ways that individuals have of perceiving the intricacy of their social environments in a human culture.

Alwyn Scott
http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/

Life, consciousness, mind, and reality explained.......2003-09-10

How does life arise from inanimate matter? How does consciousness arise from life? Is consciousness of the universe an illusion? Or is mind itself an illusion?

The British authors of this book are a mathematician and biologist pair who boldly tackle these classic questions in philosophy with some original approaches. Maintaining that life, consciousness, and culture cannot understood by reducing them to the material elements from which they arise, the authors deftly develop a set of interesting concepts. Some of these are not especially original, but they are presented in an unusual light particularly as the authors ably illustrate them with very accessible descriptions of complex biochemical pathways of living matter.

A key concept is that of emergence - well established in philosophy and roughly equated to the popular idea of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. The authors couple this concept with one of their own - complicity, or the interaction of different things which lead them to become entirely new things. A third, among several others, is that of extelligence which arises from the interaction of the intellegences of individuals and is rooted in human culture. Using these and other concepts, the book, which is at the nexus of science and philosophy, seeks to explain how life, consciousness, culture, and reality arise and the relationship between them.

Be prepared to wade through these pages slowly to enjoy the masterful exposition of this book. Or, if you find this tedious, enjoy the elegant prose which uses the lens of science and philosophy to describe events which we might normally frame in different language. In the four-page prologue, a graphic sequence of events unfolds which chart the creation of the universe to the emergence of the symbolic literary creatures which constitute the human species: QUOTE Fifteen thousand million years ago the universe was no bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence......today, the two descendants of those tiny creatures are busy delineating their own limited version of the entire story in strange, angular geometric symbols impressed in contrasting pigment upon sheets of impressed white vegetable matter. UNQUOTE

Having long forgotten more than half the courses I took in college, this book allowed me to relive and reinforce the pleasures of two wonderful philosophy seminars - on theories of mind and philosophy of science. Expect, if you get through the book cover to cover, to see the world a little differently from when you start at the prologue.

Gets one thinking along new channels........2003-03-05

Okay, okay, I admit it; I should never argue with Steven Haines about a book. I had first discovered the title Figments of Reality while reading another author. When I finally got the book, though, I discovered that I really couldn't get into it, but Steven Haines' review was so enthusiastic that it suggested that the book might be worth the extra effort, so I tried again. I'm glad I did; it's a wonderful book. It is however, very dense with information, and like D. C. Dennett's books, requires a lot of active participation in the learning process.

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are a biologist and a mathematician team who have worked together to write a book on evolution; and not just biological evolution either. They discuss the origin of life, intelligence, consciousness, concepts of reality, social order, cities, and global civilization all within a 299 page volume.

Each chapter is opened with a charming quote, usually drawn from the lore of the behavioral sciences, that illustrates in capsule the content of the chapter. My favorites were the woman scientist and her chimpanzee subject, the viper with its "dead snake" pose, and the parrot whose protest over going through a boring word list made his intelligence far more apparent than reciting the list ever could.

Addressed in these chapters were some pretty heavy duty concepts. It's not that I hadn't come across them before in my reading, but that the authors' approach was novel, at least to me. Their treatment of the statistics of evolution and especially their analysis of the "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis were particularly enlightening. Until they likened it to the opening and ending moves of a chess game, with it's myriads of potential moves between beginning and end, I had not given much thought to how misleading are the cladal diagrams of evolutionary trees. They point out that the reductionist view, that looks for a core and a root to everything, is misleading because it neglects the total picture of what is going on in the environment and the emergent aspects of the interactive parts.

In the instance of the mitochondrial studies, they point out that a breeding population would probably have been at least 100,000 individuals, and the theory of 1 Eve and 99999 Adams, doesn't make much sense. As they note, it's much more likely that there were 50,000 of each gender, some of whom carried a particular stretch of DNA. Pointing out that there is a difference between the descent of a molecular sequence and the descent of a species they write, "Possibly there did exist a Mitochondrial Eve, but she is not the Mother of Us All: she represents a particular molecular sequence for mitochondrial DNA, embodied in a population of women possessing the molecule, from whom all modern mitochondrial DNA molecules descend (p. 88)."

More intriguing still was their discussion of complicity, which is a synergy among constituent parts that gives rise to unexpected results, sort of the old saw "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." They feel that this type of unpredictable interaction among complex variables is what has given rise to human consciousness and even to the group think that occurs in crowd behavior. As they write, "One of the universal features of complicity is the emergence of new patterns, new rules, new structures, new processes that were not present, even in rudimentary form, in the separate components (p. 245)." They note that a complicity between language and intelligence might have worked synergistically, in a lock step fashion, enhancing both characteristics and in combination with what they term "extelligence," the variously stored knowledge of generations of humans, may possibly have lead to consciousness and civilization.

In their comparison of cellular evolution and village/town evolution, they again appeal to a complicity among parts, in this case individuals-or more correctly among professions-that created towns from villages. As unspecialized bacteria specialized and commingled to form nucleated cells, the members of villages began to specialize and create a larger more resilient town and as that grew, cities.

The most unique concept they presented-at least not one I'd heard before-was the possible explanation for the god phenomenon. They suggest that someone, Abraham for instance, might have been impressed by the extelligence of the environment, that "something outside himself" that knew more than he did. As they write, "It is a very small step from `There is Something out there' to `There is a Being out there (P. 264).'"

Steven was right again. This is a wonderful book. It definitely gets one thinking along new channels.

bad, bad, hilariously bad.......2002-08-24

the author must enjoy frequent lapses in his reality. the ideas are incoherent and striving towards mundane tautology. this is not a book for a curious mind. i couldn't believe someone actually wrote something so awful.

A crusade for complexity from complicity.......2001-10-29

Scientists advocating a thesis, whether their own or others, tend to adopt a crusader's approach. Cohen and Stewart here campaign for a new view of the evolution of human thinking. Their technique rests on the idea of recursive development of human cognitive capacity; building from simple foundations through increasing complexity. Their most innovative technique is a comparison of human outlook on nature, the cosmos and humanity with a fictitious alien culture based on eight. The Zarathustrians, who need eight members to be an "individual", can be equally rigid in their thinking, but the framework is wholly different from ours. The technique provides a compelling means of looking at our evolutionary record from a different viewpoint and allows the posing of questions we should all be asking ourselves about who we are. The technique adds entertainment to a highly original and readable book.

Arguing that humans are "in nature but not of it" the authors separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. What makes us different is our mental complexity. We can control our thoughts, make choices, impact the surrounding environment instead of merely responding to it. How did we come to be that way? The record of evolution shows that life's origins were clearly very simple. Perhaps, as they relate, a beginning as simple as some molecules "hitching a ride" on crystals as a step in learning the process of replication. From such origins, life progressed through building complexity in gradual steps, with some branches able to increase in complexity leading to such as you and i. The mechanism works in "phase space" by combining simple forms in a process they call "complicity." Complicity is Nature using existing "scaffolding" to build successful features. In short, evolution.

The flip side of this captivating book is their crusade against "reductionism." This straw man is a frequent target for those unable or unwilling to see human beings as an integral part of the animal kingdom, hence, a product of the evolutionary process. You will not find the target of their attack until you peruse the bibliography, but it becomes clear that their aim is Richard Dawkins. His "selfish gene" concept and his proposal on cultural aspects, a major element in their argument, are assaulted or ignored. How did the human mind evolve its distinct characteristics if not through genetic processes? The authors make great show of cultural continuity as an expression of human mental capacity. Yet, they fail to identify the roots of that persistence. The root was postulated by Richard Dawkins as the "meme," the mind's equivalent of genetic transmission of characteristics. Given Dawkins' concept preceded Figments by over a decade, their omission of the term is an astonishing oversight.

The great irony here is Cohen and Stewart's reliance on Daniel C. Dennett as a source for much of their thinking. One can envision that jolly, St Nicholas-like countenance hardening as he read their deviant interpretation of Dennett's thinking. Figments was published shortly after Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which effectively refutes much of Cohen and Stewart's thesis. Dennett uses "cranes," a more active instrument, instead of "scaffolding" to describe evolution's methods. Likewise, he nods favourably toward memes as the mechanism of cultural transmission, which Cohen and Stewart ignore completely. They rely on the mechanism Dennett considers a perversion of Darwinian thought, the "skyhook" to bring humans to an elevated role in the animal kingdom. Cohen and Stewart are to be commended for their innovative approach and unconstrained imaginations. Still, this highly readable and provocative book must be balanced with Dennett's more realistic analysis. Buy them both, you'll gain much insight into who you are.

Book Description

This digital document is an article from San Diego Business Journal, published by CBJ, L.P. on March 29, 2004. The length of the article is 559 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Ballpark: money well spent.(Our Views)
Author: John Hollon
Publication: San Diego Business Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 29, 2004
Publisher: CBJ, L.P.
Volume: 25 Issue: 13 Page: 42(1)

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Moores: 'we underpromised and overdelivered' in 2004; critics still say ballpark not money well spent.(Petco Park: a season of success)(John Moores): An article from: San Diego Business Journal

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Moores: 'we underpromised and overdelivered' in 2004; critics still say ballpark not money well spent.(Petco Park: a season of success)(John Moores): An article from: San Diego Business Journal
Pat Broderick
Manufacturer: CBJ, L.P.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from San Diego Business Journal, published by CBJ, L.P. on October 11, 2004. The length of the article is 1433 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Moores: 'we underpromised and overdelivered' in 2004; critics still say ballpark not money well spent.(Petco Park: a season of success)(John Moores)
Author: Pat Broderick
Publication: San Diego Business Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 11, 2004
Publisher: CBJ, L.P.
Volume: 25 Issue: 41 Page: 1(3)

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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