Rating: 
Summary: Attacks my hero, advocates the distasteful, but he's RIGHT!
Review: I am writing as one who has long treated Stephen Jay Gould's work as "gospel" (forgive the expression!), and as an avid user of technology but harsh skeptic with regard to artificial intelligence. This book is harshly critical of Gould in many ways, staunchly defends artificial intelligence, and convinced me that Dennett's views are justified on both fronts. As an evolutionist recently deeply involved in professional and person discussions with many intelligent and thoughtful creationists, I have looked for a thoughtful and convincing book on the logic of macroevolution that takes a much less arrogant attitude towards religious views than does Richard Dawkins (and sometimes Gould himself). Dennett makes many of Dawkins' strongest points even more clearly, and his original terminology, metaphors and interdiciplinary links, while not as flashy as Gould's, are more carefully chosen for clear explanatory value and should be more easily understandable to many people. The book is certainly not easy going, but is well worth the effort, and MIGHT, unlike Gould or Dawkins, engage those of a religious bent without enraging them as well.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: I'm very surprised at the number of reviews here which throw negative, miserly comments at Dennett's magnificent book. As Voltaire's phrase goes, "Common sense is not so common".
This is an excellent philosophical companion piece to writers on evolution such as Dawkins, Pinker, Ridley and George C. Williams.
Dennett provides a great number of powerful mental images with which to think about evolution. Skyhooks and cranes, the Library of Mendel, Reverse Engineering are all outlined with lucidity.
The book is complicated in places, but that is a plus point. Simple books won't make you smarter, this one definitely will!
I am very puzzled by religion and its durability, given that evidence for it is zero and its explanatory power is zero.
Dennett expresses it best: "The idea that we might preserve meaning by kidding ourselves is a more pessimistic, more nihilistic idea than I for one can stomach. If that were the best that could be done, I would conclude that nothing mattered after all."
Ultimately the best thing I took from this book was just how unlikely all this life is, and therefore how lucky we are to get a chance to walk on this glorious planet.
Rating: 
Summary: Shallow
Review: If creationists wanted a book that would make evolution look absurd, they could do no better than Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Allies of science and reason are done no favor by the likes of Dennett (who, by the way, has no formal scientific qualifications) and his crudely reductionist screeds.
Rating:
Summary: A must
Review: It is always useful to read the thoughts of a clever and honest man. Only recommended for those who are not afraid of looking at themselves scientifically.
Rating:
Summary: Volatile Chemical Cocktail For The Mind
Review: Passionately argued by Dennett, this is my favourite book on contemporary Darwinism and scientific debates. Dennett has many philosophical insights on how Darwin is misinterpreted by contemporary culture. His 'cranes versus skyhooks' thesis is important. His section on Nietzsche's 'Just So' stories is funny. The sections tearing apart the work of Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Stuart Kauffman, and Roger Penrose are witty but controversial. My favourite chapter is where Dennett examines the possibility of a science of memetics and comes to some well-argued - and for some writiers - unpopular conclusions. Dennett is often repititious, but adds new subtleties with each new fractal.If you think Darwinism (or science) is musty and boring, this book will change your perspective instantly. Reading this book is dangerous (like playing with volatile chemicals): it will show you that everything you know is wrong. A book known to have shattered many people's carefully constructed unreality citadels, this is a book that changes lives.
Rating:
Summary: A can-opener for closed minds.
Review: Recently, a poll on the most notable figure of the previous millennium placed Charles Darwin in fourth place. That's three short of the mark. No concept has been as wide-reaching and influential as the idea of evolution through natural selection. And this book should follow right behind. It is clearly the second most important book published. Dennett's approach deals with Darwin's idea in a philosophical and logical framework instead of a biological one. He declares it the 'universal acid'. Indeed, how does one contain the such a revolutionary notion of change over time? It has affected every aspect of the cosmos from astrophysics to quantum theory. Dennett points up better than anyone that if we truly wish to know what we are in the scheme of things, Darwin's idea is the place to start. The point of this book is, of course, that Darwin's concept hasn't been universally accepted. Even those who acknowledge evolution may still contest Darwin's mechanism of natural selection through adaptation. Dennett's analysis of iconoclast Stephen Gould's 'punctuated equilibrium' is delightfully scathing, but precisely on the mark. The role of the heretic is to threaten orthodoxy, whether or not the orthodoxy is false. Gould, after trying for a generation to scupper orthodox Darwinism, is here demonstrated to have failed miserably. His attacks, however, have frightened the orthodox without weakening the structure of natural selection. Dennett's superb critique of "punctuated equilibrium" isn't a call for blind adherence to orthodoxy, but instead demonstrates the strengths of Darwin's analysis and why Gould's iconoclasm is misleading. Gould's response to Dennett's clear review of the reality of Darwinism has been petulant stubbornness rather than sound scholarship. That's a pity. Dennett's prose is delightful. His analysis is direct and pointed in arriving at his conclusions. Taking you step by step through his presentations, it becomes unequivocally clear that his conclusions are iron-clad. Nothing is left hanging - you are brought to each point with a clarity any writer would envy. The book isn't brief, but as Mozart once responded to the criticism that there were 'too many notes' in his opera, what would you take out? Dennett builds his case with confidence, using numerous sources to support his contentions. Coupling a high degree of readability with an equally elevated scholarship is no mean feat, but Dennett achieves it with apparent ease. For contrast, try Michael Ruse's "Understanding Darwin", another philosophical view of the impact of Darwin's idea. If there's a better book somewhere on the impact of the greatest concept in science, please point it out. Dennett's analysis shows how widely Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection has permeated through all the sciences and society. The resistance to the concept remains high in the United States, the only facet Dennett is unable to address. He's not alone in that, but with the rise of Richard Dawkins' thesis of the 'meme' perhaps we may soon have an answer.
Rating: 
Summary: too twisted
Review: This book may be a treasure chest for philosophers, as an introduction to evolutionary theory it is not well suited. Too often Dennett is brillantly beating dead horses and resolves philosophical problems rather than getting to a point understandable or relevant to the normal scientifically interested reader. If Dawkins says "this is a surpassingly brillant book" he is probably right, with an emphasis on "surpassingly" - for most readers Dennets reasoning is way over the top of the head.
Rating:
Summary: Daniel Dennett does Oolon Colluphid proud
Review: This fascinating, difficult book has a simple premise: evolution describes a colossal series of individual, algorithmic steps, none of which is accompanied by any specific intention or intelligence.
At first glance this proposition seems non-controversial but, as Dennett makes very clear, the implications of this theory being right are anything but: once you accept this fundamental premise, the ground under certain positions on a number of other hoary old philosophical chestnuts begins to give way:
* God - if there's no need for intentionality or intelligence at any point in the evolutionary process, then as Oolon Colluphid might say, "That about wraps it up for God" - there's no room at the inn (ahem) for *any* God (omnipotent or otherwise) as a creator of the universe, and since religious claims to ethical validity derive from God's status as both the creator and "ruler" of the universe, they too evaporate in a puff of logic;
* Mind/AI - if we evolved from organisms which do not have any form of consciousness, and that process did not itself involve intentionality or intelligence (until the arrival of human intelligence, which Dennett would describe as a "crane") then any account of consciousness *must* be wholly explicable in physical terms, and (though Dennett doesn't say this) it must be conceptually possible, with the correct technology (which we may of course never have), to synthesise not just the functional equivalent of consciousness, but actual consciousness itself.
This second point (but not the extrapolation) is the central thesis of Dennett's equally excellent (and difficult) book "Consciousness Explained". In many ways, I wish I had read Darwin's Dangerous Idea first, for the premises on which Dennett's account of consciousness are based are set out here in a great deal of depth. I don't think I fully "got" Consciousness Explained first time, so I am going to read it again now. After I've read a cheap and trashy thriller first, as a treat for being so good.
As you progress through Darwin's Dangerous Idea, having unequivocally lost the ideas of God and a "soul", a further order of things which are very central to civilisation as we know it start to collapse as well, most notably the ideas that there are external concepts of "right" and "wrong" at all.
Throughout the first three quarters of the book, Dennett is thoroughly persuasive, with the assistance of Richard Dawkins' wonderful idea of the "meme" (which is a great meme in itself); the idea which reproduces itself and mutates within and between human brains: Just as organisms do, "fit" memes find currency and reproduce with ease; and "weak" memes aren't able to occupy enough brains, and eventually die out.
It is analogies like these that display the power of the idea: the Darwinist meme has outgrown biology and is finding application (for which read: reproducing and mutating) in epistemology, ethics, sociology, economics and pretty much every other academic discipline when you stop to think about it. The implications for this, as a unificatory theory of everything, are immense.
Having said all this, Darwin's Dangerous Idea is not without its faults.
At times Dennett is needlessly provocative, and skirts dangerously close to ad hominem arguments in his dismissal of certain competing commentators, most notably Stephen Jay Gould. By being so he gives the impression of not being dispassionate (apologies, by the way, for the double negative, but I mean something different to "passionate"!) about the subject at hand. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it leads a sceptical reader to question how fairly opposing arguments may have been set out: unless one has read the competing works (and I certainly haven't) for all we know, Dennett may be rendering straw men or at least underselling the points lined up against him.
More curiously, having already picked fights with the religious, the spiritualists and the Marxist biologists, rather late in the piece Dennett wades into the ethics debate. He might have been better advised to leave morality for another time. His final two chapters purport to apply the "universal acid" of Darwinism to ethics. You would expect this to be a rout, but after noting (quite correctly) that between them such great minds as Hobbes, Mill, Kant and Rawls failed utterly to formulate any sort of method for adjudicating right and wrong, Dennett reaches not the obvious conclusion that there is no such thing (which seems to me to be the plain implication of everything the evolutionary theory stands for), but instead puts failures of moral judgment down to insufficient information at the time of judgment formation (one never knows *all* the facts, so one can't be expected to get it right) and ventures the suggestion that there is an evolutionarily explicable moral code, but we just can't always access it.
It is not clear why he even thinks this is necessary, especially since the very lesson of evolutionary biology is that it's quite possible for something extremely clever to come about by a concatenated series of not very clever steps. If this is enough to get humans from protoplasm to cave man, I couldn't fathom what Dennett's interest was in defending the notion that from cave man forwards, humans have needed some externally derived conduct code, especially when the one thing which is undeniable from recorded history is that that competing civilisations have never progressed their cause by being nice to each other. The final two chapters in my view can therefore be skipped without significant loss.
All in all, and notwithstanding these minor grumbles, I think this is an extremely valuable and thought-provoking book.
Olly Buxton
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