"If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things."
— Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell

"Is this Tree of Life* a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred."
— Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

*The latest Terrence Malick film looks amazing. Just saw the preview earlier today at the theater. It put me in a similar state of mind as this book does. It's too bad that I can't find an official trailer online yet. When I do find one I'll probably make it known somehow.

Caleb Latimer
Brittney Toles
Deep Books
April 27th, 2022

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.

tFor my third Deep Book of 2021-2022 I have read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Daniel C. Dennett). This book falls underneath the Non-fiction genre and explores the implications that Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection (presented in “On the Origin of Species”) has on the ideals and processes used in the world. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is 521 pages long with a lexile that is unknown but I can only assume that it must be decently high based on the topic, phrases, and complex delivery of the book. The reading level of this book is overall at college level, and having a background in philosophy will aid in the notion of several sections, but it's not essential for the reader. The essential or main proposal behind the book is simple yet sufficient to understand, and the bulk of the book is largely about its implications rather than the idea of natural selection itself. The delivery of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is somehow smooth and informative with incredible vocabulary while also being confusing to understand because of the topic that is being covered. The idea of what came before the universe is an extremely debated and controversial topic especially when the topics of religion and natural selection are at hand.
t Darwin’s proposal was and still is considered “dangerous” as a consequence of the challenge it presents to the deeply ingrained belief that over there is something exceptional about life, and in particular about human life, consciousness, emotions, and so on, that can’t simply be the outcome of billions and billions of applications of a simple, mindless, mechanistic process. If the basic mechanistic premise of evolution is accepted, one’s watch of the planet and one’s own area are deeply affected. Through this idea Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life has not reshaped or changed my religious beliefs, yet it has strengthened the stance in my mind that if not my God then a God must have been at the beginning of the beginnings. Secondly, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life has impacted me greatly by presenting information about philosophy, science, religion and a little bit of artificial intelligence. I was looking for a way to learn more about religion, evolution and how they are connected, if connected at all. I could not have picked a better book then , Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life covers intense topics right off the bat keeping the reader engaged during the beginning. Dennett disagrees with many people, including Stephen J. Gould, on the idea that religion and science are compatible, and he criticizes Gould for seeing skyhooks. A skyhook is literally a floating object used for lifting things. By skyhook, he means a “supernatural explanation for something”, and by crane, he means a “natural explanation for something”. If Dennett is right, the opposition between religion and science goes deeper than The Origin of Species vs. a literal interpretation of Genesis. There's a variety of individuals who accept evolution but still preserve that God had a give in it at several points.
Daniel C. Dennett is a well known writer who covers topics such as Artificial intelligence, Philosophy of mind, Free will and Evolution. Daniel C. Dennett has had more than a large impact on the idea of consciousness, for many people Daniel C. Dennett revolutionized the way they think about consciousness through his book Consciousness Explained. Dennett has brought many questions to the surface. For example a question presented by Labexchange states “The theory of evolution relies on the heritability of traits, but the mechanism of this inheritance was not understood when the theory was developed. This reduces the credibility of the theory because the people who created it did not understand how it worked”. As well as a question from me that I am sure other people have is “If not God, then what”. This question means, although natural selection has great evidence to support it, what about before everything, what about before the chaos in the beginning, what came before the beginning. Overall, this is a wonderfully informative book. Regardless, I had already formed an identical notion of natural selection as Dennett speaks of in this book. This book was well worth reading, and it'll presumably be well-worth re-reading at some time in the future. He goes into far better explanations than I got in this review. He additionally covers topics this review hasn’t touched on, for example memes and morality.
tDarwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is one if not my favorite book that I have ever read, through the complex ideas and deep philosophical thought it continued to keep me interested. If you are someone who is more interested in knowing the truth about the world rather than in comforting yourself with fantastic fantasy stories, then I highly recommend this book.

I couldn't quite put the finger on it, but I never got through this book. It may have something to do with Dennett's tone, which, ironically, feels like he has received the wisdom from up above. So, it is still half-new!

This is my first Dennett book, and he had me worried in the first chapter with all that philosophy. Then I recognized something from my study of of effective field theory:

"Here, then, is Darwin's dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature."

He also refers to Darwin's dangerous idea as a universal acid, able to cut through tough problems, and as the first theory based on an algorithm.

Dennett goes on to talk about evolution, so-called controversies around Darwin's theory of natural selection, the origin of life, the modern synthesis, genetics, etc. This survey was mostly stuff I'd heard before, however, because Dawkins.

Then Dennett started popping caps in metaphorical asses. This is my favorite part. He laid the smack down on Noam Chomsky for denying the evolution of language. He tore up Gould's spandrels and exaptations. He explains why Searle is wrong about artificial intelligence. He debunked Penrose's theory of consciousness arising from micro-tubules.

He also criticizes sociobiology for comically and habitually underestimating human intelligence in the face of forced moves (situations with an obvious, best solution).

Dennett uses two particularly clever thought experiments in this book. One has to do with black boxes and a green, red or yellow light. I won't spoil this, but will say it has to do with Gödel's proof, cryptography, and the philosophy of mind.

The second thought experiment is that of people who want to cold sleep until a distant future date. They design an autonomous robot programmed to keep them save, and move their frozen coffin around to keep it safe and powered. This turns on its head the relationship between genes and the brain. What is the brain but a machine built by genes to aid in their survival? Fun stuff.

Very good but not perfect. It was a good introduction to the writings of Charles Darwin. It simplified such theories as that of evolution. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in evolution or any future biology students.

This book stands out as a particularly well-written overview of Darwinian theory, which includes a rather long but delightful discussion of its philosophical implications. Darwin's Dangerous Idea builds upon the fact that the process of evolution is an algorithmic one, a mechanism that dismisses esoteric explanations for specific realizations of design. Readers should benefit from being already acquainted with some ideas of evolutionary theory, mostly the works of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, John Maynard Smith and E. O. Wilson. I suggest at least reading "The Selfish Gene" before grabbing Dennett's book.

This is an exciting and rewarding book. The breadth of the author's erudition is mind-boggling and his conclusions are such that my own worldview is being reshaped by the elegance, simplicity and power of Darwin's idea.

Highly recommended.

One of the greatest narratives of all time: the story in which the mind-first, essentialist account of the universe was gradually supplanted by the natural, lawful, mindless, historically-contingent, algorithmic account inspired by the theory of evolution by natural selection - vividly described by Dennett as the "universal acid".

If you only ever read one book on evolution, make it this one. Dennett says all of the things about evolution I've ever read, thought, wanted clarified, and does it with wit and intelligence. A definite must-read for any educated person of our (or any) generation.

DESIGN OUT OF CHAOS WITHOUT MIND
This book is not "yet another pop-sci book on evolution." It does not set out to convince the reader with a series of well-known arguments that evolution is true. Instead, it assumes you've accepted the idea and explores it as an abstract framework for understanding the world. It is the first and only book I've encountered that takes evolution as a worldview and not just a biological explanation of speciation.

I drew far too many wonderful ideas and frameworks from this book to write a review essay-style, so I'll enumerate the most salient ideas by topic.

HISTORY OF THE IDEA
-Natural selection may have been the first strong step toward viewing the world by processes and not things.
-Humans ignore gathering pools of evidence until an explanation of the mechanism is proposed. In other words, we seem to value understanding and predictability over evidence.

POSSIBILITY AND DESIGN SPACES
-Speciation is not the presence of something (read: an essential nature of a species); it is the absence of reproductive bridges between related organisms.
-Discovery and invention are indistinguishable from the framework of possibility spaces. One doesn't invent theories or configurations of matter; one discovers them in design space.

CAUSATION
-History is made relevant by the future. This is especially true in evolutionary biology, in which the evolutionary past is unavoidingly coupled to the future.
-Speciation is determined by the future survival of one's ancestors; not by the contemporary actions of a proverbial "Adam" or "Eve."

PHILOSOPHY AND LIFE
-Life is a statistical fluctuation of low entropy.
-Life is matter grasping at a rock in the river of increasing entropy.

MISCONCEPTIONS
-Evolution does not process the "best" solutions; it produces "stable" solutions.
-Evolutionary thinking is not the simple application of determining whether or how a trait increases rate of survival. It is the intricate conversation that takes place between concepts such as forced moves, culture, genetics, survival, reproductive prowess, and stability.

MEMETICS
-Memes operate under different selection pressures in different groups (i.e. science, fashion) and at different levels of magnification (i.e. individuals, families).
-Commitments can be viewed as stable governments of memes. In others words, a stable collection of memes that support one another.

INTELLIGENCE
-Intelligence may be embedded in objects. We invest some intelligence in designing an object to be used by others. A user may, without a manual, recognize the use of the object and gain intelligence through it. Objects then may be seen as vectors of intelligence and sources of inspiration.

Otra obra monumental del pensamiento. Es un tratado sobre las implicaciones filosóficas del descubrimiento de la evolución biológica. Dennett centra su obra en el planteamiento de que la "peligrosa idea de Darwin" es como un ácido universal que ha corroído todo y transformado nuestra visión de la realidad. El filósofo aborda el asunto desde el punto de vista biológico, de la historia y la filosofía de la ciencia, y de la influencia del pensamiento evolucionista en diversos aspectos de nuestra sociedad, incluyendo fascinantes perspectivas sobre cómo el conocimiento de la evolución puede aportar mucho a la comprensión de los fenómenos humanos.

I picked up this book because I'm an atheist and I wanted to read something by one of the New Atheists, because the notion that anyone would want to capitalize "atheist" seemed somewhat anti-atheistic to me (aatheistic?), and Dennett appeared to be the least pig-headed. Somewhat unfortunately for my project, this book has nothing to do with atheism, but fortunately for me in general, it has everything to do with evolution by natural selection and its implications beyond biology, which is a pretty cool consolation prize.

Unfortunately, being a non-philosopher of middling mental capacities, I did not understand, well, a lot of the interesting parts of this book, possibly because I'm not up to the mental task, possibly because the author is unnecessarily prolix (I can't tell; attempts to make arguments without evidence may require prolixity), possibly because the subjects at hand are intrinsically complicated for everyone. For me, the uninteresting parts were the re-explanation of natural selection and its implications in biology, which Dennett does a good job describing and will probably be pretty good for people with little to no grounding in the area. I also found a lot of the philosophical fisticuffs with individual thinkers (Gould, Chomsky, etc.) to be excessively detailed for a lay reader. Isn't that what journals are for?

Anyway, the rest was really cool, even if I didn't grasp it all. Here are some of my take-homes

Evolution implies incremental states for all biological adaptations, including ideas like meaning, self-awareness, the mind, etc.

If you don't believe in the supernatural and you don't believe anything has simply entered the Universe ex nihilo since the Big Bang, there is no better explanation for the existence of life than evolution by natural selection, and since we have no evidence that ideas exist outside of organisms or their creations, we must assume these ideas also evolved from earlier, simpler forms. I'm frankly an unconscious subscriber to Snow's Two Cultures, and this stuff is definitely on the other side of the fence for me, but that stance is largely due to laziness, or perhaps even a subconscious discomfort with the implications: it's hard to see "determination" in the behavior of a bacterium, say, or to think that there's anything like my sense of purpose in the mechanistic actions of an enzyme. As a scientist, or at least a scientifically disposed person, I generally view these concepts as intractable, or entirely relativistic (kind of the same thing in my mind), but Dennett argues that we need to stop thinking about them in essentialist terms (e.g. meaning is meaning: pseudo-meaning is meaningless), because the alternatives all require supernatural explanations that are themselves unsatisfactory (if God gave us free will, where did she get it from?).

To quote,

Through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to "do things." This is not a florid agency—echt intentional action, with the representation of reasons, deliberation, reflection, and conscious decision—but it is the only possible ground from which the seeds of intentional action could grow. There is something alien and vaguely repellant about the quasi-agency we discover at this level—all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there's nobody home. The molecular machines perform their amazing stunts, obviously exquisitely designed, and just as obviously none the wiser about what they re doing. [...] Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. (pp. 202-203)

Biology is not like engineering, it is engineering

Dennett argues that engineering, unlike other methods of effecting change, generally involves some information gathering, making something imperfect, assessing that something, and then trying again with a better design. He views evolution, and hence all consequent biological adaptations, as being not just analogous, but exactly the same process, with different degrees of the kind of intentionality we usually ascribe to engineering. An eyeball is not miraculous: it's just version 2.0 billion.

Gould & Lewontin did not disprove adaptation by natural selection

The revelation for me is that anyone even thought they did, or that anyone interpreted their famous 1979 paper, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," as an attempt to replace adaption. I read the paper in college and my hazy recollection was that it was more of an introduction to some legitimate alternatives to adaptation as an explanation for biological phenomena that could apply in a small minority of cases, and that evolutionary biologists shouldn't assume that adaptation is always the reason, even if it usually is. That's basically where Dennett ends up in his assessment, but he goes to what seem like extraordinary lengths in doing so, to the point of dismantling G & L's central metaphor (spandrels, apparently, are not necessary if you want to hold up a vaulted ceiling). Just b/c the metaphor was poorly-chosen doesn't invalidate the idea of non-adaptive features forming the substrate for future adaption ("exaptation"). The rest of his Gould-bashing might be legit, but I think this paper got unfairly lambasted. I guess if the way Dennett depicts its legacy in the humanities is accurate, maybe it was necessary.

The interesting stuff I didn't understand concerned what these kinds of intermediary forms of ideas actually looked like, and how memes can have philosophical relevance without any scientific reality, which was sort of the entire last third of the book, I'm afraid.

Good stuff. Looking forward to looking up some reviews.

Addendum 1

Of course the most incendiary review I could find was by Gould: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi....

Dennett replied: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/review...

Kind of nasty stuff, though having just read the book, I feel like Gould misread Dennett, and while Dennett gets overly personal in some of his criticism of Gould (for my tastes, at least), he is not an Darwinian fundamentalist. I never got the sense he was trying to promote adaptation as the complete explanation for all phenomena in nature, just the bits with design.

Addendum 2

Have to admit I only knew CP Snow's Two Cultures by reputation, but my sister (denizen of the other culture that she is) pointed out that it's kind of awful, and she's right, pretty classic 50s scientific hubris (not to mention classic homophobia and misogyny). I still think people from the sciences and the humanities have trouble talking to each other. Despite the fact that my sister and I just did. And despite this article on Nabokov's butterfly research: http://nautil.us/issue/8/home/speak-b...

Goes into depth in places where many books brush over stuff. A lot more theoretical depth than most. Brings up clarifications and important caveats not normally discussed.

I like its argumentativeness. It doesn't pander to the people it's at war with. It plants its feet and throws some solid punches.

Gives some good critiques of where evpsych goes too far.


Quotes:

"On this occasion, we are not going to settle for "There, there, it will all come out all right." Our examination will take a certain amount of nerve. Feelings may get hurt. Writers on evolution usually steer clear of this apparent clash between science and religion. Fools rush in, Alexander Pope said, where angels fear to tread. Do you want to follow me? Don't you really want to know what survives this confrontation? What if it turns out that the sweet vision - or a better one - survives intact, strengthened and deepened by the encounter? Wouldn't it be a shame to forgo the opportunity for a strengthened, renewed creed, settling instead for a fragile, sickbed faith that you mistakenly supposed must not be disturbed."

"There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. Because, as the song reminds us, we want to know why. We may have outgrown the song's answer, but we will never outgrow the question. Whatever we hold precious, we cannot protect it from our curiosity, because being who we are, one of the things we can deem precious is the truth. Our love of truth is surely a central element in the meaning we find in out lives. In any case, the idea that we might preserve meaning by kidding ourselves is a more pessimistic, more nihilistic idea that I for one can stomach. If that were the best that could be done, I would conclude that nothing mattered after all. This book, then, is for those who agree that the only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it. Others are advised to close the book now and tiptoe away."

"Do organisms belong to different species when they can't interbreed, or when they just don't interbreed."

"If a single step in the genotype can produce a giant stop in the phenotype, intermediate steps for the phenotype may simply be unavailable, given the mapping rules."

"The philosopher Ronald do Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!" If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."

"The temptation, when we think about phenotypic variation, is to adopt a sort of Identikit tactic of assuming that all the minor variations we can imagine on the themes we find in actuality are truly available. Carried to the extremes, this tactic will always vastly - Vastly - overestimate what is actually possible. If the actual Tree of Life occupies Vanishingly narrow threads through the Library of Mendel, the actually possible Tree of Life is itself some rather bushier but still far from dense partial filling of the apparently possible. We have already seen that the Vast space of all imaginable phenotypes - Identikit Space, we might call it - no doubt includes huge regions for which there are no recipes in the Library of Mendel. But even along the paths through which the Tree of Life wanders, we are not guaranteed that the neighboring regions of Identikit Space are actually all accessible."

"If you believe:
(1) that adaptationism has been refuted or relegated to a minor rol in evolutionary biology, or
(2) that since adaptationism is "the central intellectual flaw of sociobiology", sociobiology has been utterly discredited as a scientific discipline, or
(3) that Gould and Eldredge's hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium overthrew orthodox neo-Darwinism, or
(4) that Gould has shown that the fact of mass extinction refutes the "extrapolationism" that is the Achilles' heel of orthodox neo-Darwinism,
then what you believe is a falsehood."

"One can hold that all adaptive characteristics are the result of natural selection without holding that all characteristics are, indeed, adaptive."

"Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genetic evolution, according to Dawkins. It is not just a process that can be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection quite exactly."

"There is no necessary connection between a meme's replicative power,its "fitness" from its point of view, and its contribution to our fitness."

"It cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth."

"Dawkins argues for the biological perspective that recognizes the beaver's dam, the spider's web, the bird's nest as not merely products of the phenotype - the individual organism considered as a functional whole - but parts of the phenotype, on par with the beaver's teeth, the spider's legs, the bird's wing."

"Experience teaches, however, that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it."

"Showing that a particular type of human behavior is ubiquitous or nearly ubiquitous in widely separated human cultures goes no way at all towards showing that there is a genetic predisposition for that particular behavior."

"If a trick is good, then it will be routinely rediscovered by every culture, without need of either genetic descent or cultural transmission of the particulars."

"Whereas animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, human behavior is largely determined by culture, a largely autonomous system of symbols and values, growing from a biological base, but growing indefinitely away from it. Able to overpower or escape biological constraints in most regards, cultures can vary from one another enough so that important portions of the variance are thereby explained...Learning is not a general-purpose process, but human beings have so many special-purpose gadgets, and learn to harness them with such versatility, that learning often can be treated as if it were an entirely medium-neutral and content-neutral gift of non-stupidity."

"Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders."