Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett

But they are not right, Dennett argues, in assuming – in truth, yearning – that these attributes arose from mechanisms altogether different from the process that gave rise to birds’ wings and the elephant’s trunk – namely, evolution by natural selection.

They are right, of course: Homo sapiens is the only species that has spoken language, highly developed consciousness, creativity and culture.

The reason for the hostility, Dennett believes, is that “People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species.” “The level of hostility and ignorance about evolution that was unabashedly expressed by eminent cognitive scientists on that occasion shocked me,” he recalls. Among the topics being discussed was the nature of language. There’s no question that Dennett is a fine thinker and an accomplished writer, but for me he piled argument upon argument beyond what was necessary and intellectually digestible.ĭennett explains that he was propelled into writing the book by what he heard at a cognitive science symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. Few mortals would be.Ī separate question is whether many readers will be up to the challenge he sets as author, for this really is a weighty book. And, whether you conclude by the time you reach the end of this massive tome that Dennett makes his case or not, you have to admit that he is up to the challenge. On the way he seeks to demolish various claims of the Harvard evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, and the Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, declaring that they are wrong, wrong, wrong in their views of evolution. Dennett’s new book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is just as ambitious and worthy of great respect.ĭennett set himself an enormous task: that of explaining why everything of importance in the world of nature – from clams to trees, from birds to humans, including the human mind and its products – is the outcome of Darwinian evolution. A philosopher at Tufts University, Dennett advanced a novel perspective on the origin and mechanism of consciousness that, while not meeting the claim of the book (how could it?), demanded serious attention. His previous book, Consciousness Explained (“In Search of the Mind’s I”, Review, 28 March 1992), was an ambitious assault on one of Western civilisation’s major, long-standing intellectual problems. DANIEL DENNETT has never been accused of modesty.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett