Daniel C. Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Penguin, 1995) ****

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett passed away earlier this year. He is one the four riders of the apocalypse, together with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, called like that for their outspoken and often militant atheism. This was a good reason to read one of Dennett's initial books on Darwin's theory of evolution. 

Thirty years after publication, the book is somewhat outdated, luckily, but unfortunately also very actual. Many of his references about genetics, quantum physics and artificial intelligence are of course no longer entirely correct, and would have been presented in a very different way today, considering the incredible progress that was made in the last decade and years. But the essence of what he writes is still valid. The idea that life is the result of random chance events, with some basic rules that continue to be subjected to chance, and the organsism's fitness to survive in an often hostile environment, is something that - my guess - roughly 90% of the world's population would still reject today. 

"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. 

Right from the beginning, the cost of doing something is running the risk of doing it wrong; of making a mistake. Our slogan could be: No taking without mistaking. The first error that ever was made was a typographical error, a copying mistake that then became the opportunity for creating a new task environment (or fitness landscape) with a new criterion of right and wrong, better and worse. A copying error "counts" as an error here only because there is a cost to getting it wrong: termination of the reproductive line at worst, or a diminution in the capacity to replicate. These are all objective matters, differences that are there whether or not we look at them, or care about them, but they bring in their train a new perspective. Before that moment, no opportunity for error existed. However things went, they went neither right nor wrong. Before that moment, there was no stable, predictive way of exercising the option of adopting the perspective from which errors might be discerned, and every mistake anybody or any­thing has ever made since is dependent on that original error-making pro­cess. In fact, there is strong selection pressure for making the genetic copying process as high-fidelity as possible, minimizing the likelihood of error. Fortunately, it cannot quite achieve perfection, for if it did, evolution would grind to a halt. This is Original Sin, in scientifically respectable guise. Like the Biblical version, it purports to explain something: the emergence of a new level of phenomena with special characteristics ( meaners in one case, sinners in the other). Unlike the Biblical version, it provides an explanation that makes sense; it does not proclaim itself to be a mysterious fact that one has to take on faith, and it has testable implications. (p. 203)

This core idea cannot be repeated enough. It's a message of humility. It's a message that requires collaboration and pragmatic solutions among people for the complex problemas that we are confronted with, instead of relying on age-old and unworkable rigid ethical concepts. 

A large part of the book consists in refuting concepts of other academics whose writings and viewpoints are no longer a point of discussion today. If you can live with this, the book is still easy to recommend, and Dennett's knowledge of various scientific disciplines and the rigour of his approach are an absolute pleasure to read. 

Our world has lost a great mind.