“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life”
By Daniel C. Dennett
Simon & Schuster
586 pp.; $30
According to the English philosopher John Lucas, philosophical naturalism is now the orthodoxy of the Western intellectual world. This is plausible; it is at any rate one of the current academic orthodoxies (another, perhaps, is the sort of creative antirealism and relativism with respect to truth associated with certain brands of postmodernism). Perhaps the easiest way to understand naturalism is to see it as the view that there is no such person as God (no all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good person who has created the world and has created human beings in his image), nor anything at all like God. The naturalist–the contemporary naturalist, at any rate–typically adds a high view of science, seeing it as the only possible source of our salvation.
Daniel Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” is a big, bright exploration and defense of naturalism–or at least of one aspect of it. In several areas it is authoritative; it is written with passion and power. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this book acquires the status of a minor (or maybe major) classic among statements of naturalism. Dennett tries to do at least three things: (1) explain Darwin’s dangerous idea and show how the world looks if you take it really seriously, (2) argue for this idea, or perhaps defend it, or perhaps argue that it is at any rate possibly true, or perhaps persuade us that it is true, or possibly true (it is hard to tell which), and (3) buck up and admonish timid, half-hearted naturalists who are unwilling to accept the full implications of their position, thus falling into false consciousness.
Dennett doesn’t confine himself to matters just of theoretical interest. He sees serious religion as steadily dwindling with the progress of science but suggests that we should keep a few Baptists and other fundamentalists around in something like cultural zoos (no doubt with sizable moats to protect the rest of us right-thinking nonfundamentalists). We should preserve a few Baptists for the sake of posterity–but not, he says, at just any cost. “Save the Baptists,” says he, “but not by all means [Dennett’s emphasis]. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world.” Save the Baptists, all right, but only if they promise not to misinform their children by teaching them “that ‘Man’ is not a product of evolution by natural selection” and other blatantly objectionable views. But what if they do insist on teaching these heresies to their children? (Baptists will be Baptists, after all.) Will we be obliged to remove Baptist children from their parents’ noxious influence? Should we put barbed wire around those zoos, and check to see if perhaps there is room for them in northern Siberia?(1) Dennett doesn’t say, but it would be interesting to hear his answer.
There is much to be said for Dennett’s book. It contains a wealth of enthusiastic information about Darwinian thinking generally, as well as many detailed explanations of particular Darwinian theories. There is an excellent explanation and development of the central notion of Design Space–the space of all possible organic designs–and some of the notions (adaptive topology) in its neighborhood. There is also a wealth of detail on topics only tangentially connected with the main lines of the argument: an excursion into spandrels and medieval architecture, a fair number of etymologies, accounts of things Dennett has thought and said, anecdotes about famous figures in the evolution of evolutionary thought, and much more. The book is well written, if a bit windy. It is fun to read, although some may be put off by its prolixity (no classical restraint and economy here), by frequent and sometimes inexplicable digressions, and by a certain pervasive tendentiousness, or perhaps a certain list toward demagoguery.(2) There is also something to be said against the book. In particular, although Dennett purveys his wares with religious fervor (and in fact his wares are, from an Augustinian point of view, broadly religious), his forays into philosophical theology and philosophy of religion are at best underwhelming. To say that they do not inspire confidence would be colossal understatement.
THE IDEA ITSELF
First, then, what is Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and why is it dangerous? As we’d expect, it includes the notion that all of the world’s creatures came into being by way of evolution–descent with modification. All contemporary creatures are linked by genealogical ties, so that any two living creatures you pick–you and the summer squash in your garden, for example–are really cousins under the skin (rind). But it involves much more than that. Dennett begins the book by recalling the words of one of his favorite childhood campfire songs, “Tell Me Why”:
Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell my why the sky’s so blue.
Then I will tell you why I love you.
He goes on to quote the last verse: “Because God made the stars to shine, . . . Because God made you, that’s why I love you.” (He even goes so far as to provide the music in an appendix, helpfully adding that “The harmony line is usually sung by the higher voices an octave above the melody.”) The image of the young Dan Dennett singing “Tell Me Why,” moistened eyes rapturously closed, is no doubt sweet and touching, but what is his point?
As follows. Darwin’s dangerous idea, says Dennett, is really the idea that the living world with all of its beauty and wonder, all of its marvelous and ingenious design, was not created by God or anything at all like God, but produced by blind, unconscious, mechanical, algorithmic processes such as natural selection–a process, he says, which creates “design out of chaos without the aid of Mind.” The idea is that mind, intelligence, foresight, planning, design are all latecomers in the universe, themselves created by the mindless process of natural selection. The idea is that human beings are the outcome of a mindless process; they are not designed or planned for by God or anyone else. And this idea is dangerous, he thinks, because if we accept it, we are forced to reconsider all our childhood and childish ideas about God, morality, value, the meaning of life, and the like. Christians, of course, believe that God has always existed; so mind has always existed, and was involved in the production and planning of whatever there is. In fact, many have thought it impossible that mind should be produced just from unthinking matter; as John Locke puts it, “It is as impossible to conceive that ever pure incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that nothing should of itself produce Matter.”(3) Darwin’s dangerous idea is that this notion is not merely not impossible; it is the sober truth of the matter.
What we have so far is really just an endorsement of perennial naturalism or atheism; Democritus and Lucretius would have agreed. What is new or special about Dennett’s version? First, Dennett sees that Darwin’s evolutionary ideas (in particular natural selection) give the naturalist a genuine suggestion as to how it could be that all the wonders of the living world should arise without divine creative activity or guidance and orchestration. Prior to the advent and development of Darwinism, the naturalist (Hume, e.g.) had no answer to the question “Well then, how did all this enormous variety of flora and fauna, with all its apparent design, get here? Where did all that design and variety come from?” But after Darwin there was an answer to the question–not a satisfactory answer, perhaps, but at least a viable story. According to Richard Dawkins, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”(4) I doubt that it is possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, but Darwinism does confer upon the naturalist a possible answer to an otherwise embarrassing question. As Dennett puts it, “Here, then, is Darwin’s dangerous idea: the algorithmic level [the level of natural selection] is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature.” He might have added as well: our moral sense, our religious sensibilities, our artistic strivings, and our ability to do science. Much of the book is an effort to show just how well this algorithmic level of explanation does, in fact, work, and what a fine answer to the above question Darwin has put into the naturalist’s hands.
Well, how does Dennett try to show that this is indeed a fine answer? First he insists that all of life really has been produced by evolution. Indeed, he adds that if you so much as doubt this, you are inexcusably ignorant: “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.” Note that you don’t have to reject evolution in order to qualify as inexcusably ignorant: all you have to do is harbor a doubt or two. You study the evidence with great care, but are finally doubtful that God did it that way: according to Dennett, you are then inexcusably ignorant. Here Dennett is stealing a march on Dawkins, who wrote in a “New York Times” book review that “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” Dennett goes Dawkins one better here, because at least Dawkins gives us skeptics a choice. We could be ignorant, or stupid, or insane, or maybe even wicked. But Dennett is made of sterner stuff: he gives us no options at all and in fact plumps for two of Dawkins’s possibilities: we evolutionary skeptics are both ignorant and wicked (inexcusable). Apparently evolution is like the law: ignorance of it is no excuse. Here Dennett and Dawkins remind one of a certain kind of religious personality with which we are all too familiar: if you disagree with them, you are not only wrong but wicked, and should be punished, if not in this world then certainly in the next.
Of course, Dennett’s claim is not just that all the marvels of contemporary life have been produced by descent with modification, but that this has happened without the aid of God or anyone (or anything) at all like God; it all happened just by the grace of mindless natural selection. Life itself originated just by way of the regularities of physics and chemistry (through a sort of extension of natural selection); and natural selection has produced language and mind, including our artistic, moral, religious, and intellectual proclivities. Many have found this claim at least extremely doubtful; is it really so much as possible that language, say, or consciousness should have been produced by processes of this sort? One of the most striking characteristics of thought is intentionality, aboutness. We can think about things of all sorts, some very far removed from us. We can think about ancient Sparta, the Big Bang, the angel Gabriel, logical theorems, moral principles, possible states of affairs, God himself, and much else: could this ability really have come about (starting from bacteria, say) just by way of mindless natural selection? Dennett doesn’t really show, of course, that this did happen. His basic ploy is just to assert (loudly and slowly, as it were) that these things must have happened, providing an accompanying blizzard of scientific hypotheses and speculations (e.g., about what happens in various parts of the brain when you remember, speak, perceive, etc.). This rich brew of contemporary evolutionary thought and hypothesis on these topics is very interesting, and Dennett has a first-rate grasp of the vast relevant literature. But (for example) none of his suggestions (drawn from cognitive science and elsewhere) really addresses the question whether it is even possible that mind and intention should have arisen in this way; they just assume that it is.(5) These parts of the book contain a good deal of unbridled speculation as well as much very energetic hand waving.
A second project of the book, as I said, is to buck up flagging naturalists. Dennett distinguishes what he calls cranes from skyhooks:
“Let us understand that a skyhook is a “mind-first” force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process.”
An example of a crane would be sexual reproduction, by virtue of which, says Dennett, organisms “can move through Design Space at a much greater speed than that achieved by organisms that reproduce asexually.” On the other hand, God’s specially creating life, or mind, or human beings, or sparrows, or whatever would be a skyhook, as would be any unspecified or unknown process (elan vital, e.g.) that takes up the slack left by alleged deficiencies in Darwinian evolution.
Now Dennett thinks there are many who have quite properly given up childhood religion and reject the idea that there is such a person as God, who endorse the idea that all living things, including ourselves, have somehow arisen by way of evolution, who pay at least lip service to Darwin’s dangerous idea, but who nonetheless don’t or can’t embrace its full implications. They find themselves doubting that Darwinian evolution can really explain or account for such things as the development of the human brain, for example, or language, or consciousness. They don’t necessarily doubt that we have somehow evolved, but they doubt or deny that Darwinian mechanisms are sufficient; there must have been something else. Such people, Dennett thinks, should be ashamed of themselves. They are soft on religion, or at least lust after skyhooks, and in so doing, they display a sort of failure of nerve, a false consciousness. Lusting after skyhooks is a bad thing, and much of the book is devoted to disapproving discussion of those who (he thinks) do–Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, John Searle, and especially Stephen Gould.(6) (Of course, the ambivalence of these thinkers may be due to something other than bad faith or faint-heartedness; perhaps they are inclined to accept Darwin’s dangerous idea, but they also see some of its implications as giving serious occasion for pause rather than as new discoveries to be enthusiastically embraced.)
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 16
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