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Book: Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life
Quotes of Book: Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
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  1. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? Is this the same as saying that it is impossible for two things to be alike? Or, finally, is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? -WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE 1953, P. 4
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  2. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    But unless dualism or vitalism is true {in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you}, you are made of robots-or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecular machines. And all of these are ultimately descended from the original macros. So something made of robots can exhibit genuine consciousness, or genuine intentionality, because you do if anything does.
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  3. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. This confusion has been fostered by evolution's friends and foes alike, and it is parallel to the confusion of the coin-toss tournament winner who basks in the misconsidered glory of the idea that since the tournament had to have a winner, and since he is the winner, the tournament had to produce him as the winner. Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us.
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  4. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    As Dawkins goes on to say {p. 316}, "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. In fact, I once argued, it is unlikely that any other theory could have this strength:
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  5. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed-and Darwin provided-was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn't count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process.
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  6. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees {Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo} than those chimpanzees are to the other apes.
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  7. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll {June 1993} discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than ten thousand years ago.
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  8. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern hightech medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human culture will ever devise. But, like folk medicine, we should test it all carefully, and take nothing whatever on faith.
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  9. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    It is not "scientism" to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in' France and the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.
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