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Book: Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Quotes of Book: Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
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  1. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things.
    book-quote

  2. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    {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 , 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 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.
    book-quotepurposeevolutionnatural-selection

  3. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    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}"
    book-quotereligiondelusioninfinite-regress

  4. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    {...} 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.
    book-quoteмалтусдрождипопулационна-експлозия

  5. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    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.
    book-quotesciencetruth

  6. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think - just ask my critics.
    book-quotequaliamultiple-drafts-model

  7. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    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."
    book-quotesciencedarwinismevolution

  8. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    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.
    book-quote

  9. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    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.
    book-quotesciencereligion

  10. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
    book-quotesciencephilosophyevolution

  11. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    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.
    book-quotescienceevolutioncreationism

  12. Daniel C. Dennett _ Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

    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.
    book-quotemememetics
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