DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA: EVOLUTION AND THE MEANINGS OF LIFE

Rating:
Summary: A Great Idea to Read...
Review:
This work more than any other lucidly explains why evolution by natural selection is the only theory which explains biological diversity across geological time. The writing is engaging and Mr. Dennett's excitement for the subject is almost rhapsodic. It certainly is infectious.

Why is Darwin's idea dangerous? Because it is true. Mr. Dennett makes this point thoroughly. I have been amazed to find this title and Mr. Dennet's name used in writings against Darwinian evolution. It is clear those author's read no farther than the title and interpreted dangerous to mean wrong or bad. I recommend you read this wonderful work the whole way through to savor the depth of reasoning and insight offered here.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not for the faint of heart!
Review: An online friend with similar interests, Steven Haines, recommended Daniel C. Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea to me some time ago. (Last year, as I recall). So enthusiastic was/is he over it, that he actually sent me a copy! After reading the book--and it took me weeks rather than days to do it--I have to say that I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand I definitely found it dense with information, a thorough critique of Darwinism and its modern variants, and certainly a very interesting work. On the other hand I found it very slow and difficult reading.

The book doesn't simply lay before the reader the author's observations and research on his topic like so many others. In fact Dennett himself points out this fact in his introduction when he notes that the volume is a book on science not a work of science. As he rightfully notes, "Science is not done by quoting authorities, however eloquent and eminent, and then evaluating their arguments (p. 11)." What he does do is describe the topic of Darwinian evolution and its impact on society, then presents the observations and research of diverse professionals in the field, critically dissecting them for the benefit and edification of the reader. It should be noted that Dennett is not himself an anthropologist or biologist, but he is trained in critical analysis. As Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and director of that institution's Center for Cognitive Studies, he is considered a philosopher whose specialty is consciousness as high-level, abstract thinking and is known as a leading proponent of the computational model of the mind. As such he is also considered a philosophical leader among the artificial intelligence (AI) community. His credentials, therefore, give him more than adequate qualifications for performing the above noted dissection with precision and thoroughness.

It is sometimes difficult for the average person, especially one who is not specifically trained in a field of research or in the rules of logic, to be objective about the literature in an area outside their specialty. The power of the written word, the forceful current of a persuasive argument, and the care with which confirming evidence is presented and refuting evidence suppressed or camouflaged, all make it difficult to see the flaws in some of the popular works on evolution--or any other science. Therein lies the value of Professor Dennett's efforts in DDI. He carefully points out the errors and strengths of the authors he cites. As he writes, "There is no such thing as a sound Argument from Authority, but authorities can be persuasive, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. I try to sort this all out....(p. 11)." And he does so step by step so that the reader can follow the logic or illogic of the arguments under discussion. In doing so he takes on some pretty visible and popular authors, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins among the better known perhaps, and some very high level math-physics intellects, most notably Stuart Kaufmann and Roger Penrose.

I found that the work almost seemed like a collection of essays of varying length on assorted topics with all of them linked by a common theme. The book is probably best read with this in mind, since it's difficult to digest in a single sitting or even with a single read. (I tend to use post-it-note page markers to highlight points on pages I wish to review after finishing a book. There were so many post-it-notes marking my copy of DDI, that a friend at work pointed out that I might just as well re-read the entire book. He's probably right!) Part of the problem lies in the book's basic premis. As a critique of various works by diverse authorities, it demands that the reader more actively participate in the thought process of that criticism. And that participation requires a rather diverse background of knowledge: anthropology, architecture, artificial intelligence, biology, evolutionary theory, game theory, physics, philosophy, are among some of the topics covered under the cover of Darwin and evolution! It also requires some knowledge of the author's under discussion.

While I don't want to scare a prospective reader, I also think that this book might be a little more than most can or wish to handle. I do think that the person who undertakes to read it, devoting to the project the time and care that it deserves, will come away with, not only a good deal of solid information, but with a first rate training in critical thinking as well!

Rating:
Summary: Philosophy, not Science
Review: As a Darwinist and a reader of Dawkins and Gould, I read this book primarily to familiarize myself with the scientific refutation of other prominent Darwinists, specifically Gould. I say "scientific," because on the upper left corner of the back cover of the paperback, it is categorized as "Science," so I thought I was reading a science book.

I started reading the book past the half-way point, in the area of content that most interested me, and I discovered a couple of things.

First, there are metaphoric terms used throughout this book, introduced in earlier chapters, which make the book difficult to fully comprehend when opening it up to read at an arbitrary later chapter, if you aren't already familiar with the metaphors (such as "skyhook" and "crane").

Second, apparently, among other subjects, this is also a book on architecture. Specifically, on arcane aspects of the architecture of domes and their supporting structures. Several pages were dedicated to this subject, including detailed pictures and diagrams. Apparently this proved that Gould is wrong, which made absolutely no sense to me, so I bit the bullet and started back at page 1.

I enjoyed the first three or so chapters of this book. A good introduction to the history of thought which immediately pre-dated Darwin, which put into context how truly revolutionary His ideas were at the time.

I couldn't get through the final chapters, something about the evolution of morals. A worthy subject, I'm sure, it's just not the subject for which I picked up this book. Again, I thought I was reading a science book.

Ultimately, I came away thinking, "Why did Dennett write this book?" More specifically, why did a non-scientist write a book purportedly about Science? Well, Dennett answers that for me, sort of. In an anecdote he tells about attending a conference of Thinkers and Scientists in the Northeasten US, and how, during a Q&A type session with attendees, the responses given clearly showed that many of these educated people had a very poor understanding of Darwin's Ideas. It was this experience, he claims, which helped further to motivate him to write this book, ostensibly to set the record straight.

If Dennett had written a book which simply synthesized and explained the current state of Darwinist thinking, I would have been more receptive. Instead, I read a book by a Philosopher who is pretending to be a Scientist, espousing his own scientific ideas, and I don't think he was able to pull that off credibly.

Rating:
Summary: Philosophy, not Science
Review: As a Darwinist and a reader of Dawkins and Gould, I read this book primarily to familiarize myself with the scientific refutation of other prominent Darwinists, specifically Gould. I say "scientific," because on the upper left corner of the back cover of the paperback, it is categorized as "Science," so I thought I was reading a science book.

I started reading the book past the half-way point, in the area of content that most interested me, and I discovered a couple of things.

First, there are metaphoric terms used throughout this book, introduced in earlier chapters, which make the book difficult to fully comprehend when opening it up to read at an arbitrary later chapter, if you aren't already familiar with the metaphors (such as "skyhook" and "crane").

Second, apparently, among other subjects, this is also a book on architecture. Specifically, on arcane aspects of the architecture of domes and their supporting structures. Several pages were dedicated to this subject, including detailed pictures and diagrams. Apparently this proved that Gould is wrong, which made absolutely no sense to me, so I bit the bullet and started back at page 1.

I enjoyed the first three or so chapters of this book. A good introduction to the history of thought which immediately pre-dated Darwin, which put into context how truly revolutionary His ideas were at the time.

I couldn't get through the final chapters, something about the evolution of morals. A worthy subject, I'm sure, it's just not the subject for which I picked up this book. Again, I thought I was reading a science book.

Ultimately, I came away thinking, "Why did Dennett write this book?" More specifically, why did a non-scientist write a book purportedly about Science? Well, Dennett answers that for me, sort of. In an anecdote he tells about attending a conference of Thinkers and Scientists in the Northeasten US, and how, during a Q&A type session with attendees, the responses given clearly showed that many of these educated people had a very poor understanding of Darwin's Ideas. It was this experience, he claims, which helped further to motivate him to write this book, ostensibly to set the record straight.

If Dennett had written a book which simply synthesized and explained the current state of Darwinist thinking, I would have been more receptive. Instead, I read a book by a Philosopher who is pretending to be a Scientist, espousing his own scientific ideas, and I don't think he was able to pull that off credibly.

Rating:
Summary: Functional Design by Mindless Processes
Review: Daniel Dennett's motivation for writing Darwin's Dangerous Idea is made clear on page 21: "If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else." Creationists aside, few would object to the notion that Darwin's theory of evolution is the most important idea in modern biology. But why would Dennett place more significance on Darwinian evolution, a biological concept which pertains only to life on earth, than on Newtonian mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity, concepts which pertain to the fundamental laws of physics throughout the universe? The answer is that Dennett views evolution by natural selection as a general purpose design algorithm, and not as an exclusively biological process. From this perspective, Dennett argues that Darwin's algorithm is ultimately responsible for all instances of design we find in the universe, from self-replicating crystals to biological lifeforms to human artifacts, culture, and ideas (including Darwin's "dangerous" idea itself, if you like recursive tangles).

Clearly when we come across something that appears to have been designed to perform a function, an explanation is called for. So a watch implies a watchmaker, as English theologian William Paley famously observed in 1803 (springs and gears don't just spontaneously arrange themselves into accurate timepieces), and a human watchmaker implies a watchmaker maker. The point of Paley's Argument from Design was that the watchmaker maker is God, and prior to Darwin there really wasn't a good alternative explanation, even though we encounter serious logical problems when we ask who created God (Dennett jokingly suggests Supergod, who in turn was created by Superdupergod). Without a Darwinian explanation, we have to imagine an unending sequence of increasingly powerful creators, or better yet, give up and declare it a divine mystery inaccessible to human reason. A key feature of evolutionary explanations is that they work from the bottom up, explaining more highly designed things in terms of a long sequence of less highly designed things, and ultimately bottoming out in things which exhibit no design at all. Dennett makes a distinction between cranes (which do their design work slowly and laboriously by understandable mechanisms) and skyhooks (explanations that appeal to magic and mystery, as if hanging unsupported from the sky). Throughout, Dennett is insistent on using only cranes.

Given Dennett's expansive reading of Darwin (i.e., the discussion isn't confined to biology), this book covers a lot of territory, and what you get is a critical overview of the most prominent theories, as well as controversies, in a wide variety of fields (biology, cosmology, philosophy, psychology, complexity theory, physics, computer science, architecture, engineering,...). The sections on the evolution of life provide a solid introduction to contemporary evolutionary thinking, and the basic ideas behind genetic evolution are well established by now, though controversies remain. Other sections are more speculative: Are the particular values of the physical constants in our universe the result of an evolutionary process occurring in a sequence of precursor universes? Is it possible to analyze the evolution of human culture and ideas by creating a science of memetics (with memes as a unit of cultural transmission), in the same way that biological evolution is analyzed through genetics (with genes as the unit of genetic transmission)? If you want firsthand accounts from the experts in their respective fields, the bibliography is a good point of departure. But if you want to see the big picture of how highly functional designs are accomplished via low-level, mindless processes which occur over long periods of time (or in the case of memetics, rather quickly), read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Tour de force!
Review: Darwin's Dangerous Idea is, to use a hackneyed but much-merited phrase, a tour de force, one of the most thoughtful, thorough, and rigorous expositions of Evolution and the Evolution Debate ever written. Whatever one thinks of Dennett's arguments, in the end, one must admire how skilfully crafted and forcefully rendered they are. Though hardly the "last word" on the debate, DDI is essential reading for anyone who takes a serious intererest in it. I cannot recommend this book more hightly.

Rating:
Summary: Too clever by half, too ponderous by far
Review: Dennett canvasses every conceivable debate over the conceptual side of natural selection.

If you lack familiarity with the intellectual landscape, or with parts of it, this encyclopedic tour will be useful. If you know the landscape, you may or may not find Dennett's contributions worth considering--they are rather less than singular.

Personally, I found the book ponderous and shapeless. I already know most of the literature to which Dennett gives his attention, and I found what I gained from his ideas was not worth the time it took to wade through the book.

This volume of thoughts has no coherent rhetorical/narrative arch, and it fails as a clear, compelling development of its thesis. Rather, it is the written record of Dennett's tour through all the current controversies that interest him. It's nice to know what Dennett thinks about all these things, but this an unimaginative strategy for producing a big book.

Dennett pushes a particular thesis and pushes it hard through every controversy: natural selection as an algorithm that can explain human development.

Dennett has an enemy: anything that smacks of making room for any kind of divine intervention. To this end, he even finds the True Believer status of such stalwarts as Stephen Jay Gould lacking. Gould is not just wrong about certain aspects of evolution, in Dennett's view; He is "One of Them," someone who, Dennett somehow divines, secretly longs for some kind of miracle. Banish the infidel!

Let me say that I am sure the universe, Earth, life, and humans evolved. I have no great interest in theology or religion. I think most stories that claim to affirm both religion and evolution, that claim to make god consistent with evolution, end up with a very feeble God-someone who did a very little work billions of years ago, then basically vanished. That is not the god of religion, as I understand religion. For religion, God must be present and active, capable of intervening in the world.

But Dennett's antipathy seems a bit much, to me. He seems altogether too certain, relative to what, in fact, we know about how the world came to pass. Is there any likelihood that evolution is false? No. Is there as much likelihood as Dennett claims that the neo-Darwinian synthesis is basically correct? I don't think so.

Dennett proves much too much-so much, that we already have reason to think his boosterism for natural selection cannot possibly be correct.

You see, Dennett spends his time and energy on Darwin's *less dangerous* idea: natural selection. But Darwin had two ideas, and the other one interested Darwin himself more: sexual selection. After publishing "The Origin," Darwin spend most of the rest of his career on the other idea.

Evolution through sexual selection is a very different beast than natural selection. It is whimsical and capricious. It's extremely sensitive to initial conditions, random fluctuations, and genetic drift. It has precious little to do with fitness, though fitness sets limiting conditions. It's unpredictable. Whether you could call it algorithmic would be highly debatable, at best.

But it is a powerful explanation for an immense body of evidence-that's evidence, not conjecture or faith or anything else questionable-that most scientists agree is nigh-impossible to square with natural selection alone. (For insatnce, it simply is not true that most scientists agree that natural selection accounts for human culture.) Sexual selection is surely consistent with natural selection, but it is not the same thing, and it explains a lot of things that natural selection can't.

That's why in the last couple or three decades, biologists and psychologists-but apparently not philosophers-have begun doing extensive research on sexual selection. (A good account can be found in Geoffrey Miller' "The Mating Mind.")

To illustrate Dennett's "excessive brilliance," that is, his proving too much: Dennett goes on and on with the notion that sexually attractive traits are fitness indicators. That was a brilliant hypothesis, not too long ago. 'Trouble is, it's false. (See, for instance, Laland and Brown, "Sense and Nonsense," page 193 for a partial listing of the falsifying studies.)

For a guy who claims to be so in love with science, Dennett has produced a book that seems to me oddly too full of generalities that science hasn't proved--or that have been disproved.

So you see, Dennett-as best I can tell--has managed to prove that an algorithmic view of natural selection is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth at exactly the time when biologists think it can't possible be that.

Now, on another matter, as a matter of moral aesthetics, if you will allow me to use that term: there is an unseemly arrogance to this book. As an intellectual, I found Dennett's self-assurance rather embarassing. (Of course, that may be why he has written more books than I have and is much more famous.)

I find unseemly that Dennett never allows for the possibility that maybe understanding our origins may turn out to be beyond us.

And I find it unseemly that he has decided that religious faith resembling a traditional sort is just wrong without giving any consideration to the sorts of experiences that matter to those who have faith. (I'm not one of them.) No one has ever come to love God because he thought that theological doctrines pose the best hypotheses for scientific explanation. Certain sorts of compelling experience, though, bend even great minds in ths strange direction.

Now, Dennett is probably much smarter than I, so maybe he is not arrogant so much as insightful. But I am not able to dismiss the possibility that some persons' religious experience may contain something important that might be beyond my conceptual grasp.

Just as my dog loves and understands me up to a point, I may love life and-using all my powers to their fullest--come to understand it up to a point. Beyond that, my gray matter cnnot go, though reality goes much further.

Personally, I don't like that idea. But a fair number of estimable thinkers have made this case, and I do not see Dennett producing any argument against it.

It is without a doubt logically possible that life, the Earth, and the universe involve forces far beyond our capacity to comprehend. I find it unseemly and boastful for Dennett not to allow that those who recognize this fact lack nothing in comparison to him, in their intelligence and their understanding of evolution.

I came away from this book admiring Dennett's prodigious intelligence, but not with any sense that I had learned much to which I should give an immense amount of weight.

This book seems to me testimony of what can happen when a brilliant, earnest thinker turns his talents to proving a point. This is boosterism, a polemic, albeit of a highbrow variety.

Too bad Dennett became a philosopher rather than a scientist. What a waste of a fine mind!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent philosophical journey
Review: Dennett is on the "strong adaptionist" side of the biological debate that has been going on over the past two decades. He is of course a philosopher of science, not a biologist himself. But, his grasp of the scientific details is firm. Because he is a philosopher, he projects conclusions that scientists normally wouldn't. The "natural selection is a natural algorithm" leaps to mind. There's no way to prove that, but its a wonderful thought experiment, as is his "universal library" analogy at the start of the book. By reading his book, I, as a layperson, came away with a much more coherent perception of what natural selection is and is not than with any book I had read to date. I also came away with a diminished perception of Stephen Jay Gould, whom for the most part I admire as a writer and scientist, but whom I now have some questions concerning motivations behind some of his ideas.

Dennett writes forcefully, which turns some people off. He also occasionally goes too far, such as with his "Christian museum" statement. But his writing never fails to educate and delight. The metaphor of natural selection as "universal acid" is dead-on. From scanning the reviews here, I can tell how some people are still trying to bottle the acid with denial and a lot of whining about the misuses of Darwin's dangerous idea. Darwin is not responsible for these, of course, and they have nothing to do with the scientific validity of his theory. As Dennett points out, what's truly dangerous about Darwin's idea is the validity of it to explain much concerning the natural world, and hence its seductiveness, which can easily lead people to wrong conclusions.

Rating:
Summary: A better focused book than you might think from the reviews
Review: Dennett's take on Darwinian natural selection is better focused than suggests the reader debate whether or not he's a vile fascist out to incarcerate creationists' children. In penning an appreciation of how Darwin made conceivable a largely automatic process that could produce the complexity and diversity of our world, Dennet really targets not those arguing against Darwin from faith but those arguing from a very different point of view.

The book's real fire aims at those who attack Darwin while pretending to search for the simplest scientific explanation of speciation. Creationists have other reasons to reject this body of thought. But Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky pretend to be interested only in the scientific question of simplest explanation.

This is what's damaging about their claim to identify Darwinian deficiencies forcing far more complex accounts of biological facts that amount to an abandonment of explanations at natural selection's level of accessibility. And this is why Dennett's demonstration that those deficiencies in fact force us to make only minor amendments to Darwin's framework is so effective and valuable.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Round-up; be cautious if you are a newbie
Review: I agree with some of the other reviewers that this is the most complete round-up of Darwin and the modern synthesis. Dennett is an excellent writer and even if he belabors some examples to the point of redundancy, he always seeks clarity and never leaves himself open for misinterpretation.

Dennett makes the argument that Darwin's ideas can be boiled down to algorithmic systems building on one another and suggests that researchers should focus their energy on finding ideas that support small, incremental evolutions rather than large sweeping changes that wind up as unexplainable phenomena. Dennett's suggestions are well-founded and I find his arguments to be quite persuasive.

I think, though, that at some points, Dennett singles out others -- particularly in the natural sciences -- for a few hatchet jobs. I am referring in particular to Stephen Jay Gould and John Maynard Smith. I find Dennett's readings of these authors to be, in his own terms, "myopic" at best. Every scientist can be wrong: it's a natural extension of discovery to expect theories to be refined. Pointing out the mistakes others have made, or areas in which the author believes the findings to be questionable, should not be an outright denial of methodology which it has the occasion to become quite often in this book.

I would approach Darwin's Dangerous Idea with these things in mind: you should seriously consider reading Gould for yourself--Wonderful Life is a great book; and Dennett draws heavily on the works of John Maynard Smith, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins: a thorough reading of these authors will better prepare you for connections Dennett attempts to create.