Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution And The Meanings Of Life (1996) - Plot & Excerpts
Dennett starts this book, careful to align the specific context of Darwin's ideas from a material biology context to one of functionalism.With this alignment, Darwin seeks to atomize all complexity into functional processes so that the material moves within a complexity are atomized into building blocks that allow for a supervenience of complexity to material atoms.For instance, he applies this maneuver from biological evolution to behavior, psychology, culture and ultimately consciousness. What Dennett notes as being skyhooks constitutes a logical break, such as the jump from ordinal numbers to the smallest limit cardinal numbers. What Dennett calls cranes are moves that constitute supervenience.This mapping is accomplished by Dennett mainly through a series of analogies and then, through a series of quotes that directly address each complexity through a dialectical structure that aligns various quotations that attempt to get at the root of contrary positions. These contrary positions are then atomized in terms of Dennett's algorithmic supervenience in order to be better incorporated into his algorithmic supervenience. If there is one thing I have noticed, it's that the presence of a dialectical structure necessarily supports an ideological position.It's hard to moralize ideological positions of this complexity because of its range, but Dennett wishes to highlight the rational consistency possible in atomizing our most difficult endeavors (ethics, culture, subjectivity). This sounds well and good, but until you understand the larger context it is difficult to address how Dennett's book is an expression of an ideologue.One of the debates in biology is a dispute about how to calibrate survival. Richard Dawkins and Dennett both wish to calibrate adaptation to the level of the gene. Some biologists would calibrate survival to the species, others to ecology. Some to the individual. Each of these optimizations of utility provide a basis for the creation of different terminologies, some of which are impossible given a radically different calibration. For instance, Stephen Jay Gould, who comes from a paleontologist background would calibrate survival to the species and thus has arrived at varyingly different concepts, some of which are nonsensical to someone like Dennett who only sees atomized genes as being the root basis for adaptive difference.When John Maynard Keynes in the 70s introduced game theory to biology he provided a tool for biologists to compare the utility of different survival adaptations. This revolutionized the field but it forced biologists to try and come to a different basis for how to compare adaptations. I recently read an essay exploring the utility of allowing non-queen workers to breed. Wasps and bees do have non-queen workers that can breed, and it has been shown that the queen may kill these offspring but at other times, may allow them to live so that the workers compete with each other. The question in this essay remained unanswerable because the authors of the essay were unable to provide a basis to decide what level to calibrate their comparison to. Since all the workers in a colony were related, should the adaptation be addressed in terms of the individual? Or the colony? Economics often does not have this problem (individual vs society) because the healthiness of each is hidden by the maximal utility of specific groups. Economists are often political simply because they will hide the (dis)favoring of a group by calibrating utility to the society, or to specific individuals in isolation.By NOT addressing his heady position to this basic difference, by explaining the mechanisms of his attempt at a supervenience view of adaptation, Dennett dismisses the veracity of other views by distorting them into failed forms of supervenience.The ideologue that Dennett wishes to superimpose is that of a consistency from the point of genetics.What makes this position obviously an ideologue is the arbitrariness of Dennett's stopgap. Dennett himself provides this analogy when he explains the problem of "levels". He utilizes the example of a computer in order to highlight this issue. When attempting to explain the processes inherent in a Word processing program, Dennett states that trying to understand the program in terms of electrical mechanics, or even at the quantum mechanics level is too much! We shouldn't try and understand the processor in terms of machine language or even at low level code, we should understand it in terms of the operating system environment and the APIs that the word processor utilizes (as well as the user context needs) in order to best understand how a word processor forms. The "baggage" of quantum mechanics or electrical engineering would be too detailed and merely mechanical from the point of view of the appropriate level, because what makes a word processor isn't the mechanical moves of its basic units but the functional consistency of its end result.As is Dennetts style, this analogy is very clear, but when we apply this analogy to Dennett's own arguments (should we not understand consciousness in terms of the needs of the individual? In terms of the need for society) does this not go against a genetic view for why consciousness needed to happen? Does not the view that genetics is the key to EVERYTHING, even religion including too much baggage? After all, might not a colony of conscious robots not having genes but needing the same economic, political coordination also form a religion?Dennett does consider that culture goes far in changing the context of what survival and adaptation means, but he seems to find the "limit cardinal" to be at the level of the gene, rather than providing a multiple level of calibration -- mainly due to this insistence on supervenience being the model we should take. If this is so, however, should he have not started this book talking about Darwinist "survival" of quantum sub-atomic laws persisting in the face of disorder?Dennett is a brilliant man and more impressively a very clear writer of very difficult ideas. But in his haste to push forward a world-philosophy-science view calibrated to that of the gene, he ends up falling prey to the same problem he would accuse others of, that genetics is a "skyhook" given the properties of chemical biology from which genetic properties can be derived. In the end, the rationality he sees as being factual is in fact, to a large degree an arbitrary choice until he is able to demonstrate that other calibrations to other levels, on their own terms, cannot provide enough consistency and explanatory power as this one. Yet even this point is arbitrary, after all, why cannot all of these different calibrations occur simultaneously in competition with one another?
Imagine running through an orchard grabbing fruit as you go. After you finish, you look back and decide to take a very large bag and stroll slowly through again, carrying a ladder picking the best fruit you can find.Darwin's Dangerous Idea is the first book I have ever read twice in a row. Dennett is a master of clear thinking and builds his case through logic, but he surveys a very large territory and I felt upon finishing my first read, that I hadn't grasped all he had to say. The second read was as enjoyable but more satisfying than the first, but rather than carrying a ladder, I pulled out a highlighter.I've always been impressed with Charles Darwin and believe that his thoughts on evolution are as significant to the advance of knowledge as the discovery of how to make fire was to the advance of civilization.For the roughly 6 million years since our branch of the tree of life separated from the ancestors we have in common with chimps and bonobos, humanity has lived in ignorance of the reality of how the world around us has come to be.Because of the unbearable anxiety that went with ignorance, it was mandatory that something be thought up to explain things and religions fit the bill. The profound difference for those who have lived within the last 150 years, is that mythology can be put aside for truth. As far as we know, we, on our little planet, exhibit for the first time the universe coming to understand itself. For all the number of earth-like planets that may be out there, we don't have a shred of evidence to date that we are not all alone.Life must be rare, if not unique to Earth. The dangerous idea that Dennett writes about is that insensate matter has, through blind unguided experimentation under a system of order (chemistry and physics) with the aid of inconceivable amounts of time, started itself and then developed to the incredible variety of life we see today through natural selection.Dennett calls this idea a universal acid because it puts holes in all of the tales we have told ourselves about a god above and our place apart from other life on earth. It's comforting to believe that there is a benevolent creator and overseer, that there is a "me" that is not entirely held within the physical body, yet nobody has ever come up with even the slightest proof that our fond desires have anything to do with the reality of our being.With great patience and a delightful sense of humor, Dennett methodically dismantles every attempt to falsify Darwin's idea. Even many scientists, he tells us, are reluctant to part with the idea of a "skyhook", an external, inexplicable agent that has somehow intervened to bring us to our condition of mind-directedness independent of natural selection.We are definitely special for having language and consciousness and culture. Dennett is not belittling mankind, far from it! He sees that we are not the helpless automatons that animals are - going through the motions of life without the ability to benefit from the rich store of information that we humans have built up and readily communicate to each other. We are the masters of our fate because we have the world of ideas that transcends our genetic recipe. There is no cause for despair, but there is cause to be wary of those who would like to return to the comforts of mythology.Darwin's Dangerous Idea is not a quick and easy read, but that is because it is so carefully crafted for the mind to follow. You cannot be distracted since an idea will be carried through several pages and you need to follow the logic. The language is not technical, Dennett peppers the text with everyday phrases. He carefully defines his terms but you have to note those definitions because the terms will pop up again and again.Most enjoyable are his mind experiments, his constructions made for the reader to better understand a point. What if you were going to go under suspended animation for centuries and had to design a robot to get you through that period of time? What characteristics would you give it to best assure your survival? The book is loaded with delights for the imagination.If you want revelation, put the bible aside and get a copy of this book. You won't need a shaman or a priest to "interpret" for you, all you need is to pay attention to find out how even what seem to be the most impenetrable mysteries fall open to clarity when viewed with the dangerous idea of Darwin's that turns out to be illuminating (and subject to proof) in so many areas.Maybe I'll read it a third time. :)
What do You think about Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution And The Meanings Of Life (1996)?
"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.
—Joshua Nomen-Mutatio
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.
—Louis
I enjoyed reading some of the philosophical implications of accepting evolution by natural selection. How it makes us look at ethics, morality, language, and life is fascinating. Hearing about the tug o war between accepting or refuting Darwin's idea in the fields of psychology, and linguistics was eye opening. Here is a quote I enjoyed: "The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy (Darwin's chief sources), but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write. Doubts about the power of Darwin's idea of natural selection to explain this evolutionary process are still intellectually respectable, however, although the burden of proof for such skepticism has become immense, as we shall see.”
—Nik
