From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett

I myself have been unable to concoct a persuasive argument for the alluring conclusion that comprehension is “intrinsically” valuable—though I find comprehension to be one of life’s greatest thrills

You can’t buy a new civilization if yours collapses, so we had better keep the civilization we have running in good repair. Who, though, are the reliable mechanics?

The politicians, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors—the leaders of our society, in short—are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends.

The edifices of social construction that shape our lives in so many regards depend on our myopic confidence that their structure is sound and needs no attention from us.

Trust is a by-product of social conditions that are at once its enabling condition and its most important product.

Civilization is a work in progress, and we abandon our attempt to understand it at our peril.

Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning, the revolutionary insight that all the design in the biosphere can be, must ultimately be, the product of blind, uncomprehending, purposeless processes of natural selection.

Evolution by natural selection can mindlessly uncover the reasons without reasoners, the free-floating rationales that explain why the parts of living things are arranged as they are, answering both questions: How come? and What for?

Darwin provided the first great instance of competence without comprehension in the process of natural selection itself. Then Turing’s strange inversion of reasoning provided an example, and a workbench for exploring the possibilities, of another variety of competence without comprehension: computers,

There is so much that can be accomplished by competence with scant comprehension—think of termite castles and stotting antelopes—that we are faced with a new puzzle: What is comprehension for, and how could a human mind like Bach’s or Gaudí’s arise?

Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian Spaces is a good thinking tool for helping us plot not only the relations between the way different species evolve but also the way evolution itself evolves, with some lineages exhibiting de-Darwinization over time.

Cultural evolution itself evolved away from undirected or “random” searches toward more effective design processes, foresighted and purposeful and dependent on the comprehension of agents: intelligent designers.