The Mindless Algorithm:

I had high hopes going into "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"! With evolution and natural selection being the main subject, what could go wrong? Written by the well known Philosopher Daniel C Dennett, I was expecting some important insights on this controversial science. Using abstract metaphors like Universal Acid, the Library of Babel and Intelligent Artificer, the author illustrates how Darwin's theory works and how it impacts all of society. While Dennett is not an evolutionary biologist, he is extremely knowledgable on a wide variety subjects and uses that vast storehouse to point out why he thinks the concept of evolution is important to us all. This is, by far, the most difficult book I've ever read, it was, by turn, interesting and then annoying. There were times when I almost called it quits and abandon the book. But my instincts were that this was an important read so I stuck it out and tried to get as much out of it as I could. I'm glad I did! What I gained from Dennett's book was a different way of looking at Darwin's theory and new insights on biology and evolution. "Universal Acid" is a hypothetical substance that cannot be contained and so too is Natural Selection. If you really want to know the "What?" or "How?" of all life on earth then you really must understand Darwin's paradigm changing theory. Dennett explores many facets of Natural Selection starting with life's origin and how and why organisms change over time. Beyond biology the book also looks at how society and some of our most cherished beliefs look different when viewed through Darwin's spyglass. I don't know what Dennett's personal beliefs are but he makes a strong case for the importance of our religious beliefs for guidance and advancement of our society, but our religious beliefs should not blind us to what science has to say and it should never influence our political system or dictate what's being taught in our schools. Big business, politics and our moral attitudes have all evolved over time, changes brought on by pressures from our "social" environment. In preparing this book for publication Dennett quoted and/or interviewed several professional scientist like, Richard Dawkins, Edward O Wilson, Stephen Gould and Jared Diamond among others. Dennett and these men did not always see "eye to eye" on some issues but Dennett was always enlightened by their input. Some of Dennett's insights got me thinking on evolution and life's origin: DNA/RNA, the basis for all life on Earth, is nothing more than a "mindless little scrap of molecular machinery" that just happens to have the ability to self-replicate. The pre-life oceans of early earth were kinda like an organic soup with molecules forming and then breaking up for millions of years on end. Some of those molecules were able to make copies of themselves and, as it turns out, DNA and RNA were the ones that worked best. And the rest is, as they say, history. Of course, if you prefer, the other option is an "Intelligent Artificer" that, in an act of Special Creation, brought all of our life forms into being in one fail swoop and they have remained unchanged since that time. The choice is yours. As far as I was concerned, this book defiantly had it's ups and downs. There were sections that I found to be dense and hard to understand, yet other parts were fascinating and led me down paths I had never traveled before. If you are looking for a real challenge in your science reading and have a patient, logical and somewhat skeptical mind then you may want to give Dennett's book a try. I had no downloading or formatting problems with this Kindle edition.

Last Ranger

This book presents itself as an overview of how evolution works and what that means for us, and while it does a good job explaining and defending natural selection, it's often more of a polemic against Dennett's various intellectual adversaries - Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, and B.F. Skinner, for instance - or in support of his allies - namely Richard Dawkins. Additionally, he tries to do a 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' sort of thing, weaving a wide variety of seemingly unrelated ideas together into a cohesive whole. While his explanation of natural selection and subsequent connection to design at large is compelling, it doesn't succeed in the same way that 'GEB' does - much of the added content seems slapped on rather than weaved in, lacking the same flow and genius. The polemics are not especially interesting or enlightening, in my opinion. Meanwhile, the conclusion, the "Meanings of Life" we are to draw from Darwin's theory, is underdeveloped, though sadly more interesting than much of the meat of the book beyond the first third.

I take issue, as well, with Dennett's philosophy. For one, I think it's reductive and ridiculous to narrow evolution down to natural selection in this rationalistic, algorhythmic sense while totally ignoring two crucial factors which guide evolution which do not fall into his framing: sexual selection and mass extinction events. These nonrational and seemingly "random" elements betray the adaptationist paradigm Dennett is presenting. Though I'm less familiar with his philosophy of consciousness as espoused in 'Consciousness Explained', from my knowledge of it, he seems to suffer a refusal to recognize the experience of consciousness (David Chalmers called his book 'Consciousness Denied') which makes it difficult for him to recognize agency in animal behavior or even human behavior which could impact the direction of evolution, either on a biological or cultural level - everything is guided, almost by an invisible hand, by genes or memes, in which case we can totally ignore the experience of, say, listening to a piece of music or contemplating an idea and merely think in terms of its "memeability" divorced from the crucial aspect that actually determines this: the experience of it. In attacking a "mind-first" conception of the universe, he seems set against the existence of minds at all. Evolution, then, is not guided by living things but genes and abstract processes which are not at all experienced by any of the living things which they supposedly guide. Despite his avowed atheism, it seems kind of supernatural to me.

A thought provoking presentation on how Darwin's idea of evolution through Natural Selection has effected thought since its publication. “Some people would much prefer the infinite regress of mysteries, apparently, but in this day and age the cost is prohibitive: you have to get yourself deceived. You can either deceive yourself or let others do the dirty work, but there is no intellectually defensible way of rebuilding the mighty barriers to comprehension that Darwin smashed. (p.25)” I recommend taking the opportunity to read this work.

Though this book is very approachable, it's also extremely dense, spanning a huge array of subjects and approaches. I felt a bit tired with the extremely long tangents that later develop into clear philosophical examples, sometimes they dragged too long, sometimes the point was clear before the reveal, but I have to agree that the points couldn't have been made with more care and clarity.

Dennet is a great thinker, he exposes everyone's way of thought as well as his own, always analyzing not only our point of views but why we choose or are compelled to think that way. He is also very nitpicky, especially trying to bring down Gould, Wilson, Penrose and Chomsky, and though I agree with the fundamental point in his argument against their slightly anti-Darwinian bendings, I think he goes extremely far into dedicating a huge portion of the book to pose those arguments.

The last third of the book gets heavy with purely philosophical themes, but I'd recommend sticking to the end. In the last chapter, Dennet's writing becomes focused, precise, poignant, and inspirational, he gathers all the energy he's built up and makes radically clear arguments. Definitely worth a read.

For people who have read a lot of Dawkins/Ridley/Harris/Diamond/Gould/etc, this book will have a lot of chapters with redundant topics (game theory and such), but there's at least something new and insightful even in known topics.

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.

"Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life' (1995) by Daniel Dennett is a remarkable book dealing with a complex concept, evolutionary biology, from a non-scientist approach. An eminent professor of Philosophy, Dennett, brings the sprinkles of humanities based arguments to this grand idea. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design (purpose or what something is for) might not need a designer. Dennett makes this case on the basis that natural selection is a blind process, which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. The book often cites Richard Dawkins, as it should, who puts Darwin' theory quite succinctly by saying, “The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity.” This is one of the key strengths of Darwin’s idea, and the key weakness of the alternatives." Dennett takes particular aim at two prominent figures in Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky (who seems to be able to end up in any academic debate) which provides for stimulating reading. In the end, I feel Darwin's dangerous idea does prevail.

A guiding principle...
“If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods—that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being—the well-being of all of us on the planet—depends on the education of our descendants.”

An excellent book.

The Evolution of Purpose

I read Darwin's Dangerous Idea ten years ago (26-Oct-2012). At the time I was a professor of Biophysics, and I read mainly for the perspective on Biology. However, there is no avoiding the religious implications.

Many of the arguments for belief in religion are of the "god of the gaps" form -- "Here's this thing that no one understands. I propose to explain it by saying that God did it." For instance, historically one of the most persuasive arguments for the existence of a god was the Argument from Design: we look at living things and we see that their organs and they themselves appear to be designed to do certain useful things. For instance, eyes appear to be designed to produce images, and lungs for breathing. Before Darwin (and Wallace), we had no explanation for how this could have come to be (that's the gap), so we proposed that these things were designed by a god.

Now, there are two things to be said about this argument. The first, which has nothing to do with evolution, is that it is in itself extraordinarily weak. Leaping from "I don't know." directly to "This other thing that someone told me HAS to be the explanation!" is obviously not careful thinking. It is, rather, what Dennett calls Philosopher's Syndrome, "mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity". The universe is not limited to things you can imagine.

However, people who want to believe find this weak argument extraordinarily tempting. The second thing is that Darwin's Dangerous Idea -- evolution by natural selection, plugged this specific gap in a way that doesn't require one to believe in a thinking, personal designer. Thus, even though the idea of evolution is not necessary to refute the Argument from Design, it makes it clear that in fact there is another possible explanation and thus makes the refutation more convincing. This is not to say that it is impossible to combine a belief in religion with a belief in evolution -- many people do, including some working biologists. However, that some people feel that there is a tension between religion and evolution is shown by the way that some religious authorities have fought against the very idea of evolution, and still do to this day.

As a biologist, I was more interested in Darwin's Dangerous Idea because of how it helped me to think about purpose. Throughout my education as a scientist (even going back to high school) I have been taught to be wary of teleology -- i.e., of ascribing purposes to things. But this wariness is not really compatible with being a working biologist. Everyone can see that the purpose of eyes is seeing, the purpose of lungs is breathing (among other things, such as speaking), and the purpose of mitochondrial F1 ATPase is synthesizing ATP. We try to talk around it, by using words other than "purpose", but this is silliness.

Dennett discusses how evolution gives biological objects purposes. (He has an excellent YouTube lecture called "The Evolution of Purpose" on this subject.) I find Dennett's careful discussion of these ideas helpful in thinking about how living things work.

Blog review.

I'm teaching this book for a philosophy of biology course this semester, so I'm read this with its potential for pedagogy in mind. All in all, I thought it was a pretty good explanation and defense of the dominant neo-Darwinian ("adaptationist") paradigm in biology, and that it spelled out some consequences of this paradigm for others area of research (philosophy of mind, linguistics, computer science, even physics). Dennett's basic theses might be summarized as follows: "We are all made of up little machines designed by the algorithmic process of natural selection. Biology is a branch of [reverse] engineering that investigates these machines. Since biology is well on its way to explaining mind and language, the prospects for AI are bright."

The book's research is a bit dated, but I actually thought that helped a little bit. In particular, we can see now that many of Dennett's scientific and philosophical adversaries (Gould, Chomsky, Fodor, Putnam, E.O. Wilson) were, in fact, on the wrong (or at least losing) side of the debate concerning the potential reach of evolutionary biology into questions of meaning, mind, language, and culture. It's a good reminder that philosophy of science, when well done, can help diagnose and correct errors within scientific practice itself. So, for example, Dennett seems undoubtedly correct when he claims that the neo-Darwinian paradigm can (with a little effort and ingenuity) be used to explain things like the origin of life from non-living materials, and the origin of semantic meanings from purely syntactic base.

This is definitely meant to a be a publicly accessible book on science and philosophy, but it's a relatively tough one. Dennett makes a legitimate effort to introduce the reader to some of the main debates in both evolutionary biology and the philosophy of biology, and he presents detailed analysis of many of the more prominent hypotheses and experimental results. Dennett's philosophical background serves him well, here, especially when compared to writers (Dawkins, Gould, Maynard Smith) with a more traditionally "scientific" background: Dennett is not trying to describe his own empirical research, but to offer a well-argued position that takes account of the best arguments on every side.

Philosopher Dan Dennett argues that the theory of natural selection is a 'universal acid', burning through our basic ideas about science and beyond, leaving a completely changed intellectual landscape. The revelation that mind did not design life inverts the traditional Christian-derived pyramid. Dennett shows that evolution needs 'no skyhooks' - no supernatural powers - and instead produced us and our artifacts and ideas using 'cranes', artefacts and strategies that accelerate development (the image derives from the fact that a small crane can be used to erect a larger one). He explains and answers the critiques of opponents to orthodox neo-Darwinism, and points out pitfalls on both sides, for example distinguishing sensible (in fact, tautological) reductionism from 'greedy reductionism' (one culprit in the latter category is behaviourism in psychology: Skinnerians who believe that all behaviour is a function of operant conditioning. The inadequacy of such theories has been demonstrated by, for instance, the research of linguists like Chomsky)

Dennett points out that natural selection is an algorithmic process, and carefully examines the implications for science and philosophy, including ethics. An interesting consequence is support for the possibility of artificial intelligence (since consciousness is not magic, but arises from biological phenomena: the mind is in the brain). He develops the idea of 'memes' as mental analogues of genes; symbiotes evolved to live in minds, making persons of the humans they infest and hyper-accelerating life's trajectory through design-space.

"The prize is, for the first time, a stable system of explanation that does not go round in circles or spiral off in an infinite regress of mysteries. Some people would prefer an infinite regress of mysteries, apparently, but in this day and age the cost is prohibitive: you have to get yourself deceived. You can either deceive yourself or let others do the dirty work, but there is no intellectually defensible way of rebuilding the mighty barriers to comprehension that Darwin smashed."

Re-read because of Dennett’s recent death. This meticulous 1995 work was seminal, but for me personally the important arguments had been (and remain) more lucidly and elegantly covered in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker (1986). Also, many of the topics covered by Dennett have now received a further thirty years of development and discussion (particularly animal cognition and AI).

However, Dennett’s book is extremely valuable for its use of the contrasting images of ‘cranes’ and ‘skyhooks’ as ways of building complexity. Essentially, if you want to lift something up, you can do so from below, using a crane, or from above. But from above you have to have something to attach the lifting device to. The word skyhook, rather nicely, derives from a First World War pilot who was asked to stay aloft an extra hour, to which his reply was, ‘My plane isn’t fitted with skyhooks.’

Prior to the 19th century you needed skyhooks (usually gods) to explain complex design. Darwinism gives us the necessary cranes and dispenses with the need for skyhooks. For Dennett and Dawkins (and me!) it’s all cranes. Everything has emerged, evolved, through building up from the bottom – life, the universe, everything (including consciousness, intelligence, culture, the lot). There is no need to invoke some supernatural phenomenon, a god, a deus ex machina (Greek theatre), to explain anything – partly because such a phenomenon would itself need explanation.

Once one starts employing the imagery of cranes and skyhooks, it’s interesting how widely they’re applicable. Biology, engineering (inevitably), economics, philosophy (of course), psychology, selfhood…

2024 Thumbnail Review #30 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett

Footnote: amusingly, scientists are now busy exploring the idea of real skyhooks, or more correctly spacehooks. You can’t suspend something from the sky, but you can suspend things from satellites in orbit.

This lengthy and thought-provoking book by Dan Dennett is more a treatise on Darwinian thought than a commentary on the Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. It highlights and discusses the many offshoots of thought relating to reductionism, utilitarianism, Kantism and many other lines of philosophical rumination when considered in the light of Darwinian principles of the evolution of living organisms, the algorithmic nature of the existence of such and the anatomical and behavioral traits they possess and display. This commentary on the interpretations over time by many celebrated and infamous luminaries of the fields of philosophy, biology - evolutionary and sociobiology and other thought leaders includes the reflections of Darwin himself and dwells on the fallacies and incongruencies of thought committed by the experts, that resulted from either limited or incomplete knowledge or the inability to logically and consistently articulate the meaning of Darwinian existence and its implications on human existence.

Dennett is clearly an adherent to the ideas formulated by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" and to those that have read Dawkins' work and tend to understand and agree with his take on the prime replicator and therefore, the prime benefactor of utility, it is not hard to see the philosophical scaffolding that Dennett builds around these ideas to support his arguments. Dennett spends a considerable amount of page real estate identifying why Darwin's idea is considered so dangerous by so many who are wedded to a traditionalist or exceptionalist interpretation of the meaning of human life and how it stands apart from the meaning of other forms of life. In doing so, he focuses special energy in lambasting Stephen Jay Gould for his insistence on factors other than natural selection leading to selection and goes into many examples why Gould's instances for what he, Gould, presented as new and revolutionary ways of understanding evolution, in reality, fit very well into the well known picture of natural selection as supported by John Maynard Smith.

The text gets a little circumloquacious in places and there is a constant reference to sky-hooks and cranes that if you didn't really get the analogy for the first time it is introduced in the book, you may find hard to fit into the picture in the scores of other places where they are mentioned. There is also the usual philosophical abstraction of thought in many places that is hard for someone who deals more in concrete ideas to follow. However, the book is a prolific provider of fodder for thought and presents many ideas that one may have considered before but not in a certain way that would yield different results or confuse them more. Overall, a long and arduous but decent read.

An easy, simple, pleasant read.