Coevolution: The True Story of a Man Taken for Ten Days to an Extraterrestrial Civilization

Customer Reviews:

Great book!.......2004-07-10

This is really going to be one of the best abduction books of all time. I have read all the ufo abduction books out there and this one is truly "the message" from our alien neighbors.

Amazing.......2002-10-27

Alec is honest, and this can be easily discerned immediately. This is the first book he's ever written, but it is pleasure to read. Why? It's not about "style". It's about honesty. He has succeeded in applying the simple principle of honesty in relating the FACTS about what he experienced and his own reaction to it. And what AMAZING facts. I will not go into any details, I will simply say this: I am so glad I found this book, and read it, because I now know things I never knew before, about a subject which our "leaders" don't want us to know anything about. This is perhaps among the top 2 of, say the 25 books I have read in this field. Thanks Alec, you lucky son of a gun.

Makes a change.......2000-01-30

Well I've read a few of these types of books, this one is different mostly because the author does not make to many judgement calls, does not pretend to be an expert or know what this is all about, I like that about the book. If the terrestrial after events really did happen, and I'm sure it would not take to much work by someone to prove that part one way or the other, if they did happen, it makes for great back up to an amazing event. Makes you wonder if the author knows more than he's telling! I think the last part about future technology is an eye opener and not a bad guess.

What a Disappointment.......2000-01-18

It was with excitement that I waited for this book to arrive. By the time I had finished it, I felt deflated and misled.

Although I am not trying to discredit Mr. Newald, his story seemed to ring very hollow to me. Several things left me saying "huh?", not the least of which were his numerous references to "other" information he had, but preferred not to share in this tome (saving it for another book, perhaps?). These pieces of information were related to his experience "there" and suspicious activity "here" after he was returned home.

For being gone,and usually conscious, for a period of 10 days on another planet (and/or in another time)the book is very short, only 193 pages.

This book may be superb for the neophyte, but those with a lot of UFO reading under their belt may very well be left feeling as I did: "Huh?"

Coevolution - The True Story of a man taken for 10 days.......2000-01-15

The reviews had me curious enough to buy this book. I was severly disappointed with the information available. It seems Alec is rarely given the answers he seeks by these Aliens. Thus, leaving the reader in the same position.

Personally, I battled inside if this story was true or not. I looked at it from both angles. I checked out a reference he gave from the CFR and found it to be non-existant. Alec did not do his homework well on this point leaving me doubtful and wondering how many other holes I can find.

I would not recommend anyone buying this book, unless they want to use it to verify the information put in it....as Alec is so good at telling his reader to research all these things for themselves. I recommend going to the library and doing an inter-library loan for this book. And, most of this story can be gleened straight from the internet under UFO and different conspiracy theories. It didn't offer any new information.

Book Description

Coevolution—reciprocal evolutionary change in interacting species driven by natural selection—is one of the most important ecological and genetic processes organizing the earth's biodiversity: most plants and animals require coevolved interactions with other species to survive and reproduce. The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution analyzes how the biology of species provides the raw material for long-term coevolution, evaluates how local coadaptation forms the basic module of coevolutionary change, and explores how the coevolutionary process reshapes locally coevolving interactions across the earth's constantly changing landscapes.

Picking up where his influential The Coevolutionary Process left off, John N. Thompson synthesizes the state of a rapidly developing science that integrates approaches from evolutionary ecology, population genetics, phylogeography, systematics, evolutionary biochemistry and physiology, and molecular biology. Using models, data, and hypotheses to develop a complete conceptual framework, Thompson also draws on examples from a wide range of taxa and environments, illustrating the expanding breadth and depth of research in coevolutionary biology.

Customer Reviews:

A wonderful compendium of information.......2006-09-19

A superbly written text available at a super price. Sums up much of what is known and not known about the coevolutionary process. Does a great job at explaining the theory and critical importance of symbiotic interactions to understanding general ecology and evolution. Also summarizes most of what he wrote about in his earlier books on this subject. The chapters range from the population level to large geographical scales. Three entire chapters on "antagonists" and three entire chapters on "mutualists". Good balance of theory and empirical examples. [Yes, I am an ecologist!] Highly recommended...

The Origin of Ecologies by Means of Natural Selection.......2006-01-13

We all know of examples of coevolution. The variety of flowering plants and their pollinators is a spectacular example. But this book looks at coevolution on a very small scale. For example, in parts of the Rocky Mountains where crossbill birds are the main eaters of the seeds of lodgepole pines, the cones have evolved mostly to defend against the birds and the birds' bills have evolved mostly to counter those defenses. This is coevolution. But there are also many regions in the Rockies where the primary eaters of pine seeds are squirrels or moths. In those regions those animals mostly shape the cones and the birds bills evolve accordingly. Such regional variations constitute the geographical mosaic of the title.

This book was written to convince researchers that the geographic mosaic of evolution is much more important than most evolution researchers recognize. It contains many, many examples such as the crossbills, and it states many general principles, which are often very similar to previous principles. It has none of the glamour or scope of, say, an account of the transition from fishes to land-dwelling animals. Instead, it is about how researchers study the working of evolution from generation to generation, and that is the level at which evolution actually works. I think anyone who is seriously interested in evolution should read one such book in his lifetime. This book is a good one because the examples aren't too technical. Be prepared to skim over some sections, and to decide which sections you can skim over without losing continuity.

It is also worth noting that, as in most academic writing, nothing is said in plain English if it can be expressed in jargon.

The last chapter deals with something entirely new in evolution: intelligent design. Humans are promoting some forms (through breeding and other forms of genetic engineering), demoting others (by pest control, antibiotics, et al.), and massively transforming environments (e.g. cities and farms). These present unique problems for evolution researchers because they are much faster than "natural" evolution. But they may well be the most important for the future of the species closest to our hearts.

(For more about where this review is coming from, you can click on my name, above.)

Parasitic Birds and Their Hosts: Studies in Coevolution (Oxford Ornithology Series)

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Parasitic Birds and Their Hosts: Studies in Coevolution (Oxford Ornithology Series)

Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0195099761

Book Description

This book is the first to present a comprehensive overview of parasitic birds and their hosts. Although the phenomenon has attracted the interest of naturalists and evolutionists since Darwin, only recently have researchers applied modern evolutionary theory and experimental methods to study the various adaptations related to brood parasitism. The work in this field is accelerating rapidly, and this volume collects work from the individuals and research groups around the world who have been responsible for nearly every major study in the last ten years. The papers present valuable summaries along with substantial new research, and the volume concludes with a review of important unsolved questions. The book is an invaluable resource on this fascinating topic, covering the remarkable sequences of adaptations and counter-adaptations, along with the perhaps even more remarkable cases where adaptations seem to be lacking.

Tangled Trees: Phylogeny, Cospeciation, and Coevolution

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Coevolution
Creating relationships between trees

Tangled Trees: Phylogeny, Cospeciation, and Coevolution

Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226644677

Book Description

In recent years, the use of molecular data to build phylogenetic trees and sophisticated computer-aided techniques to analyze them have led to a revolution in the study of cospeciation. Tangled Trees provides an up-to-date review and synthesis of current knowledge about phylogeny, cospeciation, and coevolution. The opening chapters present various methodological and theoretical approaches, ranging from the well-known parsimony approach to "jungles" and Bayesian statistical models. Then a series of empirical chapters discusses detailed studies of cospeciation involving vertebrate hosts and their parasites, including nematodes, viruses, and lice. Tangled Trees will be welcomed by researchers in a wide variety of fields, from parasitology and ecology to systematics and evolutionary biology.

Contributors:
Sarah Al-Tamimi, Michael A. Charleston, Dale H. Clayton, James W. Demastes, Russell D. Gray, Mark S. Hafner, John P. Huelsenbeck, J.-P. Hugot, Kevin P. Johnson, Peter Kabat, Bret Larget, Joanne Martin, Yannis Michalakis, Roderic D. M. Page, Ricardo L. Palma, Adrian M. Paterson, Susan L. Perkins, Andy Purvis, Bruce Rannala, David L. Reed, Fredrik Ronquist, Theresa A. Spradling, Jason Taylor, Michael Tristem

Customer Reviews:

Coevolution.......2007-08-09

The book is a series of mongraphs by different authors, all discussing various aspects of coevolution.

Creating relationships between trees.......2004-08-17

Parasites are often quite choosy about the species that they infect. In some cases, even slightly different hosts have very different parasites - the connections can be very close. Hosts change, though. They migrate to new ranges and split, through evolution, into new species. The parasites that depend on those hosts must adapt or die.

This creates fascinating relationships between the family trees of the host and parasite species. That is the subject of this book: the study of the parasite's phylogeny, in terms of the host's. (The reasoning can be applied to symbionts or to species with other dependency relationships, as well.) The book is a series of mongraphs by different authors, all discussing various aspects of coevolution. The actual times and places of speciation events are lost to history, so much of the discussion centers on ways to create credible phylogentic histories, and to estimate the probability of any guess being accurate.

About 2/3 of the book is biologically oriented: case studies of various host/parasite relationships, actually families of hosts and related families of parasites. Some of these are very interesting. One uses presence of a single parasite to argue for a close relationship between two rodent clades. Others describe coevolution at different scales, subject to different forces, or in different biological systems. I have to admit, though, that the biology is tangential to my own interests.

The first third of the book is more mathematical, the material that's closer to my own needs. It starts with a basic discussion of the events - branching in the family tree, jumping between branches, and so on. This includes discussion of approaches to take for resolving two trees, scoring mechanisms for evaluating conjectured relationships, and more. It's also a logical next step in bioinformatics. Historically, solved problems turn into steps in larger problems. Once, just getting a sequence was an achievement. Next, the sequence was taken for granted and comparison of two was the achievement. Successively, comparisons became steps in tree-building algorithms, then individual trees became pieces of "consensus trees", statistically graded estimates of history. This study takes different trees as the inputs, and creates histories of coevolution between them.

This would be a good second or third book on coevolution and computational support for the study. Unfortunately, there does not currently seem to be a first book - this just leaps into advanced discussions that assume a large base of knowledge. The references are all to current journal articles, in biology, evolution, and mathematical graph theory. Well, that's a normal part of the progression from a specialist study to a widely-known body of practice. Introductory material may not exist for some years to come.

For now, this seems to be the only book around that describes computational analysis of coevolution at all. This is not for the cut-and-paste programmer, but serious software developers will find some good basics and references.

//wiredweird

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The Coevolutionary Process
John N. Thompson
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226797600

Book Description

Traditional ecological approaches to species evolution have frequently studied too few species, relatively small areas, and relatively short time spans. In The Coevolutionary Process, John N. Thompson advances a new conceptual approach to the evolution of species interactions—the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution. Thompson demonstrates how an integrated study of life histories, genetics, and the geographic structure of populations yields a broader understanding of coevolution, or the development of reciprocal adaptations and specializations in interdependent species.

Using examples of species interactions from an enormous range of taxa, Thompson examines how and when extreme specialization evolves in interdependent species and how geographic differences in specialization, adaptation, and the outcomes of interactions shape coevolution. Through the geographic mosaic theory, Thompson bridges the gap between the study of specialization and coevolution in local communities and the study of broader patterns seen in comparisons of the phylogenies of interacting species.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)

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Uneven, but interesting account of Engelbart's crusade.
Story of a little known pioneer!

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
Thierry Bardini
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0804738718
Release Date: 2000-11-20

Amazon.com

Some revolutions are thoroughly televised. When Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated small-w windows and a funny wooden device called a mouse back in 1968, interest jumped quickly and he became the progenitor of the PC. Now, less widely known than the successful entrepreneurs who made billions from his innovations, his story deserves deeper attention as an outstanding example of practical creative research. Communications professor Thierry Bardini examines the scope of his work before and during his tenure at the Stanford Research Institute in Bootstrapping, a thoughtful history of an underreported story.

Bardini cleverly sidesteps the postmodern superanalysis of his colleagues to present a clear, straightforward glimpse into Engelbart's environment of inspiration. As an engineer familiar with the earliest computers, he quickly came to understand that their complexity could rapidly outpace human ability to cope--and thus was born the concept of the "user." His team used their computing power to determine how best to use their computing power--a reflexive assignment of profound brilliance--and churned out novel concepts and designs faster than their contemporaries could absorb them.

How and why this occurred as it did is the focus of Bardini's research, and students of creativity and the history of computing will have fits of ecstasy that he has compiled his work so accessibly. Better still, Bootstrapping shows research done right and is essential reading for R&D types everywhere. --Rob Lightner

Book Description

Bootstrapping analyzes the genesis of personal computing from both technological and social perspectives, through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of personal computing as we know it, including the mouse, the windowed user interface, and hypertext. Today, all these technologies are well known, even taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations behind their invention are not. Bootstrapping establishes Douglas Engelbart’s contribution through a detailed history of both the material and the symbolic constitution of his system’s human-computer interface in the context of the computer research community in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world’s problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving these problems was becoming shorter and shorter. What was needed, he determined, was a system that would augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which a radical technological improvement could lead to a radical improvement in how to make people work effectively. What was involved in Engelbart’s project was not just the invention of a computerized system that would enable humans, acting together, to manage complexity, but the invention of a new kind of human, “the user.” What he ultimately envisioned was a “bootstrapping” process by which those who actually invented the hardware and software of this new system would simultaneously reinvent the human in a new form.

The book also offers a careful narrative of the collapse of Engelbart’s laboratory at Stanford Research Institute, and the further translation of Engelbart’s vision. It shows that Engelbart’s ultimate goal of coevolution came to be translated in terms of technological progress and human adaptation to supposedly user-friendly technologies. At a time of the massive diffusion of the World Wide Web, Bootstrapping recalls the early experiments and original ideals that led to today’s “information revolution.”

Customer Reviews:

Uneven, but interesting account of Engelbart's crusade........2005-05-24

While possibly everyone even mildly interested in the history of GUIs will have heard of Doug Engelbart's groundbreaking "mother of all demos" of oNLine System from 1968, there's usually much less emphasis on its history, relevance and context. "Bootstrapping" provides this knowledge, giving a detailed history of Doug Engelbart's "crusade" -- starting with his studies and ending with the closure of Augmentation Research Center. It also positions NLS in a broader context of Engelbart's vision of the symbiosis of the user and the system, which went much further and deeper than just the mouse and proto-hypertext (that's not to say that these inventions do not get their fair share of attention in the book). Superbly researched, the book suffers from sometimes overly dry and scholarly tone, going into unnecessary details, and perhaps exhibiting too much sympathy for Engelbart. However, it's worth its cover price, even if for accurate portrayal of the future that hasn't been.

Story of a little known pioneer!.......2001-08-05

These days only the big guys get the credit for the technology we use every day. In Bootstrapping, Bardini looks at the life and contributions of Douglas Engelbart to the personal computing revolution. More than the story of technology, Bootstrapping is the story of a personal crusade to make interfacing with computers easier. Bardini focuses too much on the person and not enough on the context of Engelbart's innovations, hence the 4 stars.

Insects and Plants: Parallel Evolution & Adaptations, Second Edition (Flora and Fauna Handbook)

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Insects and Plants: Parallel Evolution & Adaptations, Second Edition (Flora and Fauna Handbook)
Jolivet
Manufacturer: CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1877743100

Book Description

Insects and plants, whether or not they coevolved, have intimate interrelationships. This book concisely yet thoroughly describes these phenomena. In one chapter the salient facts known about carnivorous plants are described. In another, ant and plant relationships are summarized as an introduction to this vast subject. Pollination, of great interest to agriculturists and horticulturists, is briefly explained without the complexities detailed in the massive literature on this topic. Many other subjects are discussed, such as the memory of adult butterflies, which enables them to return to their host plants in the case of the polyphagous species. The book is seeded with such thought-provoking discussions as prostitution among the orchids and botanical indigestion in some plants.

Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)

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Well worth its Schumpeter prize
Fine print

Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
Johann Peter Murmann
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0521684153

Book Description

Entrepreneurs, managers, and policy makers must make decisions about a future that is inherently uncertain. Since the only rational guide for the future is the past, analysis of previous episodes in industrial development can shape informed decisions about what the future will hold. Historical scholarship that seeks to uncover systematically the causal processes transforming industries is thus of vital importance to the executives and managers shaping business policy today. With this in mind, Johann Peter Murmann compares the development of the synthetic dye industry in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States through the lenses of evolutionary theory. The rise of this industry constitutes an important chapter in business, economic, and technological history because synthetic dyes, invented in 1856, were the first scientific discovery quickly to give rise to a new industry. Just as with contemporary high tech industries, the synthetic dye business faced considerable uncertainty that led to many surprises for the agents involved. After the discovery of synthetic dyes, British firms led the industry for the first eight years, but German firms came to dominate the industry for decades; American firms, in contrast, played only a minor role in this important development. Murmann identifies differences in educational institutions and patent laws as the key reasons for German leadership in the industry. Successful firms developed strong ties to the centers of organic chemistry knowledge. As Murmann demonstrates, a complex coevolutionary process linking firms, technology, and national institutions resulted in very different degrees of industrial success among the dye firms in the three countries.

Customer Reviews:

Well worth its Schumpeter prize.......2006-08-13

This book well deserves the $10,000 prize which the Schumpeter Society awarded it. It throws a brilliant new light on the development of one of the key factors shaping the modern business world, intellectual property. As just one example, the first synthetic dyes were invented and innovated in England, yet within 40 years, German firms held 95% of the world market for them. Murmann explains how much this owed to the way the Germans gave their firms a level of patent protection in 1877 which was not matched in Britain until 1905, by which time it was too late.

Fine print.......2006-06-22

I bought this book to use in a class, but I only read four pages before giving up because it was just too much to read. Get a magnifying glass people. This book is written in fine print. You'd think they would publish it in a font that would comfortable to read. For that reason alone I returned it in favor of another.

Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues (Helix Book)

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This is not about yellow fever or black goddesses
Not worth it
A singularly dull read
Read this book
Stilted prose

Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues (Helix Book)
Christopher Wills
Manufacturer: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0201328186

Customer Reviews:

This is not about yellow fever or black goddesses.......2007-07-25

I bought this book because I was looking for something about the epidemiology of yellow fever. There is nothing about yellow fever in this book -- it is mentioned only three times, in passing -- and even less about some putative "black goddess" of cholera, who may or may not have ever been worshipped.

Catchy title, though.

Much of the information is out of date. Patarroyo's malaria vaccine, for example, was a failure. Zimbabwe is no longer an attractive tourist destination.

The argument that tropical diseases have to make compromises to travel in temperate climes is hardly news. All organisms have to make compromises.

In any case, as regards fears that tropical diseases will spread to temperate climes -- not a popular issue when this book was published in 1996 -- the prophylactic is not to attack global warming but to make people rich. Rich people don't get the plague, no matter how warm they are.

Not worth it.......2004-02-09

I am a student working on a project/report for this book and sadly i had volutarily purchased it thinking i was in for a good book. Not the case. Although it is informative, most people aren't university professors reading up on their evolution. It is DULL and i ended up reading about 2/3 of the book because the project was due soon and you probably dont care, anyway i have since read the whole book and it bored me into writing this. Wills absolutely does not succeed in fulfilling its title. So if you are doing a project DO NOT PICK THIS BOOK. NEVAR. EVAR. sry Chris Wills...u did it to yourself...

A singularly dull read.......2000-12-18

_Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues_ could have been a penetrating examination of the relationship between humanity and disease. Christopher Willis certainly had fertile ground to work, but the book ends up being a dull and pedantic trudge that fails to bring the best of the academic or the popular to the reader.

The text wanders through evolutionary biology and human history without any real sense of direction. The biographies and personal histories read like indifferent `human interest' stories injected into an otherwise uninteresting science news broadcast.

Read this book.......2000-02-06

Wills does not provide an exhaustive review of diseases, but selects illustrative examples. I find this preferable to a less in-depth discussion of a large number of diseases. His incorporation of personal experiences, and theoretical speculations on disease and diversity add breadth and depth to this book. I thought it was excellent.

Stilted prose.......1998-10-02

While the subject of the book is fascinating, and there is some interesting information in the book, the book would greatly benefit from substantial editing, with emphasis on writing style.
The book suffers from a number of writing faults. If it's a book about "the coevolution of people and plagues" (its subtitle), why are the author's world travels constantly thrown at the reader? "One of my most searing memories is of being surrounded on a street in Hyderabad by a crowd of lepers.... I reached Vellore, a cheerful and relatively clean market town, after a hectic 120-kilometre bus ride from Madras...."
If the reader makes it past the travelogue, the reader will still have to get through the prose and commas. "Yet the AIDS virus, despite its fearsome aspects, has had just as much difficulty in spreading through the human population as syphilis or typhoid, and has had to make equally dramatic compromises in order to retain its ability to spread" is a typical sentence.
The subject would be much better served if the author could stay on topic and the book was presented as an adventure to be discovered and enjoyed instead of making each sentence (and the book itself) a puzzle to be penetrated.

The Emergent Ego: Complexity and Coevolution in the Psychoanalytic Process

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Interesting, but still a "just so" story?
A Monumental Contribution
A Revolutionary Book about Psychoanalysis

The Emergent Ego: Complexity and Coevolution in the Psychoanalytic Process
Stanley R. Palombo
Manufacturer: Intl Universities Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0823616665

Book Description

The Emergent Ego offers a new scientific approach to the psychoanalytic process based on revolutionary new findings in complexity theory and modern evolutionary theory. Its primary thesis is that adaptive change in the patient results from the coevolution of the therapeutic dyad in the analytic ecosystem. The application of complexity theory to the psychoanalytic process extends the power of psychoanalytic theory to account for the full range of events that characterize the therapeutic relationship.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting, but still a "just so" story?.......2002-11-06

I picked up this book because of previous familiarity with Stuart Kaufmanns other work. I have no academic background in psychology, but I have a general interest in this type of literature.

The general information on complexity science included in the book was very interesting, and included a section on the evolution of biochemistry which I had never seen before. The sections were also very well written and suitable for readers with little background in natural science. So full points for these sections of the book.

However, I had some trouble with the sections looking at psychoanalysis and comparing it to complex system theory. To my knowledge, traditional Freudian ideas about personality development have been much criticised in their own right. Is the authors use of these explanations for deeper psychological motivations in his patients earnest, or just an attempt at avoiding taking on too much controversy at the same time?

Personally, I find the analogy between complex system development and the process of going through personal development compelling. However, this book does not constitute proof that these processes are related in the way that the author states. It is probably difficult at this point in time to attain such proof, and I agree with people like Daniel Dennett that explanations based on analogies may not always be a bad thing. However, it's still possible for skeptics to dismiss these theories as "just so" stories. (Rudyard Kipling wrote a book of fables called "Just So Stories" and it has become a name for make-believe evolutionary explanations without sure proof).

Freuds ideas on what shapes us may not be scientifically sound, although the general process of therapy may be a process where slow progress is interspersed with more significant phase transitions. This may have nothing to do with Freudian theory, but could for example be a function of how our brain works, and work independently of the system of therapy employed. Modern theories on consciousness state that the brain is a self-organizing complex system. Thus, different therapeutic methods may trigger the same kind of underlying development process. The methods may not be equally good at achieving progress, and the choice of the best method may also depend on the nature of the patient's problem.

I would however encourage further scientific exploration of this theme, and this book is an important first step in that direction. I therefore recommend this to anyone interested in personal development, psychotherapy or psychoanalysis.

A Monumental Contribution.......2000-04-03

This book results from the meeting of two extraordinary minds. Stanley Palombo is our leading psychoanalytic authority on dreaming and primary process mentation. His pioneering 1978 book, "Dreaming and Memory," replaced many of Freud's antiquated ideas about dreaming with a modern theory that takes account of both the basic information processing function of dreaming and the defensive alterations introduced into dreaming by the censorship mechanism Freud described. Stuart Kauffman is the brilliant exponent of complexity theory whose ideas have reshaped our understanding of the origins and evolution of life. Kauffman's universe is not a static residue of chance events but a material system that naturally promotes ever increasing diversity and complexity. In this book, Palombo turns to the questions raised by the therapeutic action of the psychoanalytic process. After reading Kauffman's "The Origins of Order," he travelled to the Santa Fe Insitute to discuss his own ideas on this critical topic with Kauffman. "The Emergent Ego" is the result of these discussions. Using the ideas of Kauffman and other complexity theorists to explain his own clinical observations, Palombo provides a coherent scientific understanding of the interaction between patient and analyst. In so doing, he demystifies the psychoanalytic process and exposes many of the technical errors induced by unjustified theoretical assumptions. "The Emergent Ego" offers a powerful cure for the doubts many people feel about the scientific validity of psychoanalysis and its value as a method of treatment for sufferers from emotional illness.

A Revolutionary Book about Psychoanalysis.......2000-01-24

This book has transformed my understanding of the psychoanalytic process and how it works to benefit patients. Instead of a hodge-podge of isolated rules of thumb for psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, "The Emergent Ego" presents a coherent picture of the process through which evolutionary change takes place in treatment, in both the therapist and the patient. Palombo conceives of the therapeutic relationship as an ecosystem in which the analyst's knowledge of the patient and the patient's self-knowledge coevolve. This occurs through a continual updating and restructuring of the analytic discourse, the memories shared between patient and analyst of the events of the analysis, including the cumulative structure formed by the connections formulated by both partners in the relationship. Progress is marked by a series of phase transitions in the organization of the patient's mind, both conscious and unconscious. Since the phase transitions often appear to be sudden and discontinuous, the course of treatment may contain periods when nothing seems to be happening, but which then resolve into a sudden coming together of insight and feeling.

There is much more to this book than I can summarize in a paragraph or two. It introduces a new scientific paradigm that quahes any doubts about the scientific authenticity of psychoanalysis. I recommend it to anyone who is serious about understanding what psychoanalysis really is and how it can be done most effectively.

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