Dennett at his best. I would define the topic shortly as "the philosophy of evolutionary biology". Dennett goes through various aspects of evolutionary thinking and how they should really be understood. A major theme is how evolutionary explanations can account for just about all the different aspects of humanity and the world in which we live now; how all these amazing things around and in us really can have emerged from something simpler. In practice, this means answering a lot of critics who want to insert hidden miracles to explain this or that thing. Dennett's way of going through all this is impressive: his argumentation is compelling and clear, and you can see the depth and breadth of background knowledge behind it stretching far into the distance.

This book is great for the scientific understanding of evolution. It is also more than that. I wish people were not so threatened by this vision of the universe giving birth to us without mysterious intervention, in steps that we can (somewhat) understand. I personally feel that this makes us much more parts of the universe than stories relying in miracles and unexplained absolute values.

This is by far the best book I have read this year. It uses the narrative of Darwin's deceptively simple idea of making complex things from a very simple algorithm. The author beats this thought in to the reader and at the same time covers how the world changed because of that.

The book is really more philosophical than scientific but it's accessible to the non-philosopher like me. He starts by telling the listener the mindset during Darwin's time. Plato's universal forms would lead to absolute categories such as species (either your a donkey or a horse) and Aristotle's importance of essence for the nature of things to be the thing. Darwin had to overcome that kind of thought. Darwin dances around what a species is in his "Origins of Species" because for his theory to work you must realize that there are intermediaries between objects and the thinking at that time would not allow for intermediaries. All of the above, I got from just the first chapter in the book, and you too can be just as entertained as I was!

The author tells me that Locke would say that mind must come from mind, that is God must have created man. Now, I have finally started to understand Locke. Oddly, David Hume, almost had the concept of evolution by natural selection but just couldn't take the next step to get there. (How I love David Hume!, a man a head of his times). Hobbes gave us "just so stories" to explain the creation of society and Leviathan.

The nearly infinite decision space (what he calls the 'library in the tower of Babel') gives false security to believers in Sky Hooks (deus ex machina believers, Gould, Penrose and Chomskey), as opposed to the believers in sky cranes (Darwin's Brilliant Idea).

The author has long sections on Psychology (Skinner is wrong!), and morality (morality is complex!). He even delves into one of my favorite topics, Godol's incompleteness theorem and how Penrose is wrong to say it proves artificial intelligence will never succeed. All the time, the author uses the narrative of Darwin's Brilliant Idea, simple algorithms can lead to amazing results.

A negative review on audible led me to this book. The reviewer said that the first half of the book was about philosophy and how good Dawkins is, and the second half spends most of the time criticizing Gould. I knew I wanted the book after having read that review. (To the reviewers credit, he's not being nasty, but fairly accurate).

I loved this book. It's a rare one which challenges my beliefs, keeps me focused and transcends me to hard to reach places in my mind which makes me really think about my place in the universe and understand it just a tiny bit more. Besides, it's fun to be able act like an intellectual snob while talking in a waffle shop with a stranger and have the person think I'm intellectual heavyweight while knowing I only know that stuff because I just listened to one fine book, and more importantly keeps me from having to listen to his stories about some unimportant job he had thirty years ago!

One of those books that does have the potential to cause a revolution in your thinking. I'm pretty sure it had that effect on me, though it's impossible to verify the degree of Dennett's certainty in the algorithmic power of natural selection, and I suspect that other mechanisms of genetic inheritance, particularly epigenetic, are going to supersede this blanket confidence in natural selection alone. Nevertheless the mathematical fact of evolutionary history at every micro and macro level is powerfully argued, and I think is really the only game in town at the moment.

Part 1: Introducing some metaphors that will help you understand part 2
Part 2: A very dense and interesting section on the origins of life, marcos, sky-hooks and design-space.
Part 3: A lengthy essay about why Steven J. Gould is wrong about everything ever
Part 4: A discussion of Godel, the possibility of strong AI, and a gorgeous section on Ethical Naturalism

We all know (or should...) about evolution and natural selection. But do we fully understand the repercussions of it? More than a century and an half after the bombshell 'The Origins of Species' exploded, it seems not, as if we were still dusting ourselves, shellshocked, and trying to comprehend. Daniel Dennett, here, just adds to the polemics, tackling not evolutionary theory per se (it has a long history even prior to Darwin) but its key driving force, natural selection. To him indeed, this is where evolutionary biology's most controversial feature lies in. Why?

First, because it completely shatter the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God. The process indeed, that he compares to an algorithm, doesn't have to involve an intelligent design, since it's as blind as it is random. Such understanding, here, is key, since -according to Dennett- it's not only religious people who can feel unsettled by such view, but some scientists too, many still clinging to what he calls a 'skyhook'. What is it about?

He then goes onto the attack against the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis of Stephen J. Gould, and that he accuses of being illogic, if not relying on 'miracles' to explain when it has to face big, yet sudden, evolutionary changes. Siding with the gradualists, of whom Richard Dawkins has always been a defender, it's no surprise, then, to see him defending the selfish gene hypothesis, comparing here genetics to an acid corroding every other fields of study even beyond hard sciences. Does it matter?

To him, of course, it does, since he claims that we also find fallacious 'skyhooks' from philosophy (e.g. dualism to explain consciousness) to linguistics (e.g. generative grammar to explain language) and ethics (e.g. spirituality to explain moral). He targets, especially, Roger Penrose and Noam Chomsky. Interestingly, he again calls to the rescue the biologist Richard Dawkins (here, his views of what constitute 'memes') in very engrossing chapters dealing with socio-biology and its many controversies, either clumsy (E.O. Wilson) or downright immoral (e.g. social Darwinism).

As always with Dennett, here's a very dense book, requiring a lot of effort to fully engage with the topics at hand especially given that he touches upon a wide array of seemingly unrelated fields of research. Personally, though, and as much as I otherwise like Dennett's work and views (I'm an atheist too, and I too think that Darwin indeed killed God -whatever way you look at it) I couldn't quite reach a decisive conclusion as to this read. The fault lies not with the author, but with me: I'm not familiar with some of his targets' work and ideas, and so couldn't be sure whether he had points or, was being unfair and/or indulging in strawman arguments. Nevertheless, it remains a fascinating read for anyone interested in philosophy, evolution, atheism, and/or, even, linguistics.

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea is a much-needed wake-up call to the many academics who still think that all of natural selection's implications can be safely quarantined within biology and that it doesn't have any consequences on how we do philosophy or any other branch of the humanities. Dennett exposes and explodes, bit by careful bit, that myth. He shows how Darwin's idea (that design can and does emerge from a process that is itself without a designer and without any awareness of any kind) overturns some deeply-held intuitions and cherished perspectives people have unthinkingly taken for granted throughout our history as a thinking, questioning species. Evolution has stunning implications for certain traditional musings about morality, the mind, religion, culture etc. In many cases the old ideas are invigorated by the dangerous idea that Darwin (and, to a lesser extent, Wallace) put forward and are strengthened. Other ideas dissolve in the 'universal acid' (Dennett's powerful image) and we are painstakingly shown how this is not a frightening notion that should lead to despair because the Darwinian replacements are often better than the pre-Darwinian inaccuracies. This is a stunning book for which the term 'food for thought' is an impoverished image: this is a feast for the mind.

“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” by Daniel C. Dennett is one of the better books on Evolution available. Dennett is probably best known as one of The Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris), i.e. atheists who speak out against the problems that organized religion causes in our society. Of the four, though, Dennett tends to stay away from the blood-boiling criticism in which the others sometimes engage. Instead, Dennett spends his time discussing the state of the science. This book is a very good example of Dennett’s approach as he focuses on the science and the theories, though there are a few exceptions which I will discuss later in this review.

The book has three sections. The first section is titled “Starting in the Middle” in which Dennett discusses where the theory of evolution is today, where it started (including pre-Darwin theories of evolution), and how it has reached its current state. The second section is “Darwinian Thinking in Biology” talks about recent biological theories which claim to move beyond Darwinian Theory and Dennett attempts to bring them all back to either Darwin or the supernatural or “cranes or skyhooks” using Dennett’s terms. The last section is “Mind, Meaning, Mathematics, and Morality” and it looks at some of the more difficult questions, for which Dennett provides plausible scenarios.

The strengths of this book are many. To begin with Dennett creates a set of terms, like his “skyhooks” and “cranes” to facilitate the discussion and make it very easy for the reader to follow. In addition, Dennett builds examples from the start and in some cases takes those examples through a large part of the book and uses them very cleverly to aide in explaining the topic. The writing is clear, the discussion is thorough, and Dennett does not let the discussion to become too technical, though at the same time he provides a bibliography which provides a place to look for more information on any of the specific subtopics that one finds interesting.

There are a couple of things which I didn’t like about the book, the first one being rather small and insignificant. At the top of the second page of the book, and extending to the footnote, Dennett goes out of his way to pick a fight with creationism. Dennett calls “creation science,” ‘a pathetic hodgepodge of pious pseudo-science’ and then in the footnote states ‘I will not devote any space in this book to cataloguing the deep flaws in creationism, or supporting my peremptory condemnation of it. I take that job to have been admirably done by Kitcher 1982, Futuyma 1983, Gilkey 1985, and others.’ I think Dennett would have been well served with a statement that he was not going to talk about “creation science” and left it at that. Instead this comes across as petty name-calling and is beneath the author.

The other issue is that Dennett has the same reaction to any suggestion that there is a mechanism other than natural selection, and those who suggest there is he accuses of looking for “skyhooks” or in other words a supernatural entity. I think that this is a rather big mistake, and it results in Dennett being very critical of some others, including Stephen Jay Gould, but from my reading of Gould he was open to other natural mechanisms, and considered concepts like constraints to be mechanisms. Perhaps Dennett’s interactions with creationists have made him a bit too sensitive in this area, but whatever the cause I consider it a significant weakness in the book.

Overall the book is a very good discussion of the topic, and is suitable for readers who are already familiar with the subject and want to delve deeper, as well as those who know little about it and want to learn about it. While there are a couple of areas that I would rather Dennett had taken a different approach, those are far outweighed by the strengths of Dennett’s writing, and philosophical approach to the discussion of the topic. This book easily rates 4-stars.

What are the origins of life, of meaning, of "design", of cause?

Dennett takes us through time, from Aristotle/Plato's "telos", to Creationism, Locke's "irrefutable" "Mind", and other philosophical musings.

Like "universal acid", Darwin's idea shatters through these older concepts. Mother Nature is the blind watch-maker, and Dennett shows us how (via Darwinism) "Design" can arise from "Order". Biology is then reduced to engineering, with a myopic "Tinkerer". Apparent design, intentionality at one level can be made with mindless automatons at lower levels.

The "dangerousness" of Darwinism comes when these ideas are applied to the human species. If we really are just another "node" on the Tree of Life, wouldn't life be devoid of meaning and morality? Many challenges have been thrown at (orthodox) Darwinism, including: panspermia, intergalactic gene-splicers, multiple origins of life and Lamarckism. These have all been refuted, strengthening Darwinism in the process.

The last place for a skyhook, some intrinsic uniqueness of human beings, would be the human mind. Dennett explores Dawkin's notion of memes, culture, and how these interplay with genes and development to create complex human intellect. But is there anything that really separates human mind from the other animals'? Dennett argues that there is no skyhook for the human mind, but cranes generating cranes generating cranes. Some quantum theories attempt to re-introduce a "skyhook", but this in itself is reductio ad absurdum with Godel's second incompleteness theorem: if Design Space is an evolutionary algorithm, that generates a non-algorithmic brain, then that makes Design Space non-algorithmic (!). I can't see how this will ever work. I'm convinced that the brain is an algorithmic machine, with its own set of axioms and truth generator, but not infinitely so: there will be truths that the (a?) brain cannot prove.

Some discussion in the end regarding the effects of Darwinism on social studies (quite a heated field, can ducks "rape"?), ethics, and religion. Natural selection and evolution doesn't give answers to everything.

I have a loonnggg ways to go to fully comprehending this book. Probably will take at least 2 more re-reads. Main points aside, Dennett has also shown me, a non-philosopher, non-scientist new terms and ways of thinking: the libraries of Babel/Mendel/Toshiba, simulations with "Life Physics", pruning the tree in "Design Space" and various philosophical thought experiments.

For me, this was definitely an enlightening but rather difficult read. Wasn't impossible though, I think Dennett should be one of the more accessible philosophers to read. Great book!

If you want to read only one book about evolution and its implications, this is it. Dennett's intellect is frightening.

I heard this read by Kevin Stilwell. He captured Dennett in his declamatory, confident, score-settling, and wry self. Although I still remain puzzled about DD's dogged acceptance of Dawkins' memes, perhaps in the more than quarter century since this survey appeared, their affirmation has been either strengthened or revised, given advances in genetic science. He begins and ends his narrative movingly, and that framework endures.

My review wont do justice to this work by the genius thinker that Dan Dennett is. Let me start by saying this tome is not for the faint of heart. I claim to be no scientist or genius, rather a curious thinker, but this book has by far been the most intellectually taxing yet satisfying book I've read.

The author beautifully uses various streams of science - from biology to critical reasoning to AI to physics and chemistry - and adds philosophy with brilliant examples and analogies and metaphors, to defend, educate and explain Darwin's dangerous idea - Evolution.

If you're a religious person trying to understand evolution, this isn't the right starting book for you. However, if you're an agnostic/atheist/free-thinker looking for an intelligent read, then this is the perfect entree for your mind.

I listened to the Audiobook version of the book, and I remember rewinding and re-listening certain passages multiple times to grasp and comprehend the concept being explained. Every chapter's end will definitely leave you thinking for hours, and make you little more intelligent than when you started the chapter.

My appreciation for the present and past scientists working in the field of evolution and biology and genetics has definitely grown multifolds, and same for philosophers and thinkers of present and past centuries.I will definitely be revisiting this book later when I'm older and wiser. Totally recommend this book.