Name: Darwin's dangerous idea
ISBN: 9780684824710

Darwin's dangerous idea

In this groundbreaking and very accessible book, Daniel C. Dennett, the acclaimed author of Consciousness Explained, demonstrates the power of the theory of natural selection and shows how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of our place in the universe. Following Darwinian thinking to its logical conclusions is a risky business, with pitfalls for everybody. Creationists and others who reject evolution are not the only ones to fall into the traps. Many who accept the validity of Darwin's conclusions hesitate before their implications and distort his theory, fearful that it is politically incorrect or antireligious, or that it robs life of all spirituality. Dennett explains the scientific theory of natural selection in vivid terms, and shows how it extends far beyond biology.

What Hacker News says

glensteinDec 2025

Thank you for posting this, as I find it to be a very stimulating article on account of how maddening I believe the core argument is (but that's by some metrics a sign of a great article or at least a great hn post). Right off the bat, the charge of "hubris" in physics feels like a cheap shot playing on an equivocation of what "fundamental" means. It can mean "look at what I study, it's more important than what you study!" But I think the charitable reading of physics as "fundamental" is not that it's self absorbed hubris but that it's, specifically, attempting to discover our universe's most basic ingredients whatever they may be. Reductionism isn't a lessening of significance of living creatures, unless, I think, you have a challenged imagination. This was the central point of Darwin's Dangerous Idea which if it were up to me would be required reading.

I think the claim that modern physics has not "born significant fruit" is ridiculous, we're practically in a golden age of explosively exciting research on holography, borne from the toolkit of string theory and now emerging as the new most promising direction for a possible conceptual revolution of spacetime. That's a grab people in the street and shake them "it's happening" level of exciting! I will keep banging the drum that holography is in need of a Brian Greene style public ambassador, it's now the BFD that string theory used to be.

>The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things—such as organisms—knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality

I find this to be mind bogglingly nonsensical and disappointing, and a reminder that for a much maligned discipline, we still badly need good philosophy and good philosophers. Complexity research is built on the infrastructure of physics and reductionism is fully compatible with understanding systems in terms of dynamic interactions. Those are an explanatory layer rather than a displacement of the basic physical elements making up systems. The problem, I think, is not that reductionism doesn't contain the possibility of conceptual infrastructure necessary to understand complexity, it's that it contains that and much besides. It's like the Library of Babel, effectively.

Perhaps the strongest warning sign here is how closely it mirrors arguments for intelligent design, which serves, I think, as a helpful museum of philosophical errors one can try to exploit to insert pseudoscience, and therefore as cautionary about the conceptual infrastructure from which "more is different" borrows.

There are philosophically consistent and clear eyed characterizations of the problem out there, using such language as emergentism and supervenience, that are at least alert to the fact that they have to specify what exactly the "more" is and how exactly it's "different" in ways that get around the causal closure principle. But the most frustrating errors in this space involve mistaking processes, behavioral dynamics, or certain thresholds of conceptual abstraction for refutations of reductionism as an account of causation. It's the same mistake critics of AI made in insisting that the complex logic of human grammar was impossible in principle to model on symbol manipulation because minds have magical ephemeral concepts in them like "insight", or "tacit knowledge". I would say no, it's not that, its an inadvertent confession of a limited imagination not appreciating how small systems based on simple elements can achieve staggering complexity, which reflects more reference and respect for their complexity than insisting they run into hard limits.

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spicyusernameOct 2024

I was very influenced by Kurt Vonnegut when I was a teenager. Coming of age is a perfect time to learn that the fact that life is absurd doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't laugh, just the opposite. Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five are some of my favorite books of his.

As an adult, I've been very influenced by the late Daniel Dennett and his naturalist philosophy. Books like From Bacteria to Bach and Back or Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

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the-mitrMay 2024

Some of Denett's works have been very influential in shaping my ideas about the world. Being a physicist by training, I did not (could not because of lack of exposure?) appreciate the concept of natural selection till I read his Darwin's Dangerous Idea. That book completely transformed my way of looking at principle of natural selection. The Mind's I anthology was another one which blew me away as a youngster. Finally his ideas on religion/atheism as presented in Breaking the Spell contributed to making sense of unorganised thoughts I had.

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AlbertCoryApr 2024

So sad. I was on the team that brought him to Google, and my task was to get his signature on the video release form. Here's the talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0

I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again.

He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."

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AlbertCoryJun 2023

There's a great book with that very phrase in its title: Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

I actually got to speak to the author, Daniel Dennett! I told him it was one of the few books where, when I got to the end, I wanted to immediately read it again. He said, "I'm not sure if that's a good thing."

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glensteinMar 2023

Well I think that understates the actual vastness and complexity and actual 'magic' that's embodied in a system capable of such a thing as thinking.

And I do think that so many people are motivated to dispute this precisely because it feels scary that we might merely be such a thing, and we need to reserve some extra special thing, some form of magic, in order to differentiate ourselves as special. Darwin's Dangerous idea by Daniel Dennett is one of my favorite books because it tackles this very idea.

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