Darwin's Dangerous Idea Quotes

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
—Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods—that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being—the well-being of all of us on the planet—depends on the education of our descendants.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully.

The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.

It's your serve.

Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?

Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. (...) Whatever we hold precious, we cannot protect it from our curiosity, because being who we are, one of the things we deem precious is the truth.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“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.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“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.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“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.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“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.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“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.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“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:”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“Neither Darwin nor Nietzsche was politically correct, fortunately for us.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“What conditions have to be in effect for evolution by natural selection to occur? The words I put into Darwin's mouth were simple: Give me Order, and time, and I will give you Design. But what we have subsequently learned is that not every variety of Order is sufficient for evolvability. As we saw illustrated by Conway's Game of Life, you have to have just the right sort of Order, with just the right mix of freedom and constraint, growth and decay, rigidity and fluidity, for good things to happen at all.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“[T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some–an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book The Mind of God, proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces" (Davies 1992, p. 232). This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn't the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin's inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of "mindless, purposeless forces.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“Some people would much prefer the infinite regress of mysteries, apparently, but in this day and age the cost is prohibitive: you have to get yourself deceived. You can either deceive yourself or let others do the dirty work, but there is no intellectually defensible way of rebuilding the mighty barriers to comprehension that Darwin smashed. (p.25)”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“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.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“[...] нормалното положение на нещата за всяка живо същество, което се размножава, е такова, че при всяко поколение се ражда по-многобройно потомство, отколкото е възможно да се възпроизведе. Иначе казано, ножът почти винаги е опрян до кокала.

Познат пример за действието на правилото на Малтус е размножаването на популация от дрожди в парче тесто или гроздов сок. Благодарение на изобилието от захари и други хранителни вещества следва популационна експлозия, която при тестото продължава в продължение на няколко часа, а при сока - няколко седмици. Рано или късно обаче популацията достига описания от Малтус тава в резултат от собствената си ненаситност и натрупването на отпадъчни продукти - въглероден двуокис (благодарение на който се появяват мехурчетата при втасването на хляба или в шампанското) и алкохол, които ние харесваме - за разлика от горките дрожди.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“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”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“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.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“A grandmother stack is a subset of women related by maternity within any of the sets A, B, C, of mothers of mothers. . . . Thus in set B, the mothers of people alive today, there is the following grandmother stack: Andrea (mother of my grandson), Susan (my wife), Ruth (my mother-in-law), and her mother, the late Sylvia.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life