Darwin s Dangerous Idea

For more than thirty-five years, I ve been studying evolution - originally the evolution of cancer (Shostak and Tammariello, 1969 Shostak, 1981), and more recently, the evolution of tissues (Shostak, 1993 Shostak and Kolluri, 1995). During this time, I have encountered reductionism, sometimes as a prod and frequently as an obstacle. I have learned, thereby, to appreciate the difficulties that reductionism presents for studying evolution. Thus, when Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of evolution and consciousness, asks in his perennially popular, Darwin s Dangerous Idea, Who s Afraid of Reductionism (Dennett, 1995, p. 80) I m compelled to answer I am and explain why. 

Darwin s Dangerous Idea. The reductionism is Dennett s dangerous idea. 

Dennett, D. C. (1995), Darwin s Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Penguin Books, London. 

Sohotra Sarkar I never thought I would ever be in a position to defend Dennett, particularly Darwin s Dangerous Idea book, but I do think you are being unfair to him. I mean, what he did mean by bland reductionism primarily is some kind of physicalism that nobody is going to deny, and that s all he meant by that. And then what you are presenting here as definitions are statements he makes, and those are not things that he calls definitions. 

Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin s Dangerous Idea, Simon Schuster, New York, pp. 515-516. 

What we more often rationalize is Mother Nature, who carefully adjusts creatures to their environments through the process of natural selection. (Dennett, Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology , Darwin s Dangerous Idea, esp. chapters 8 and 9). 

This perhaps startling point of view is admirably explained and defended by Daniel Dennett in his lucid philosophical meditation on Darwinian theory, Darwin s Dangerous Idea, where he neatly explains the necessity for Platonic thinking by using this intriguing thought experiment ... 

D. Dennett. Possibility naturalized. In Darwin s Dangerous Idea. New York ... 

D. Dennett. Darwin s Dangerous Idea. New York, NY Simon and Schnster (1995). The term skyhook is deflned on p. 74, but is integral to the whole thesis of the book and is discussed intermittently throughout. 

All of this raises the question of why some physicists appear to take such a naive view of biology, even though they clearly are not naive about their own subject. In his interesting book Darwin s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett suggests that what physicists miss in biological theory is a set of laws that allow the properties and states of systems to be expressed in simple (or not so simple) mathematical equations. But natural selection is not a law in this sense rather it describes a procedure, what computer scientists would call an... 

Dennett, D. (1996). Darwin s dangerous idea Evolution and the meaning of life. New York Simon and Schuster. 

---