I am far from agreeing with everything Dennett says, even in this book, but "if you read just one book on evolution...", this is my vote. He paints the picture in its starkest terms, and is very, very, very smart. Also a fine writer, and funny. He has a gift for side-stepping debates that have become jargon-laden. This means you have to think when you read him, because the terms of the discussion are not those of the last seven articles you read; you have to do the translating as you go. Dennett's distinction between cranes and skyhooks alone is a meme that will (I hope) live a long and happy life. Note though, he is a philosopher and not strictly speaking an evolutionary biologist. For my money this is perfectly fine, and Dennett goes out of his way to get his scientific street-cred, so it does not justify any slams of the book; but readers might want to know what the author's credentials are.

As to his polemics: Despite his anti-religious aniumus, Dennett is for the most part more even-handed here than in some of his later more expressly tendentious work. This is not to say that his engagements with religion, or ethics, or even philosophy of mind, in this book are of the same level of sophistication as his accounts of evolutionary theory (they are not); but he does a fine job of laying out the implications of a hard-core Darwinist position, in a manner that is solid, careful, and hard-hitting. As has been noted by other reviewers, Dennett includes some swipes at Stephen Jay Gould which might seem distracting to one not privy to the background. I suspect much of it hinges upon Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria," the idea that science does not have the final say in matters of values, ethics, the arts, and indeed in metaphysics and religion; but that neither can any other discourse legitimately trespass on science's grounds. This means, for instance, that whether the Pope or William Jennings Bryan likes it or not, science has the last word as to whether the Earth rotates the sun or vice-versa, and as to whether homo sapiens and the bonobo chimp share a common ancestor; but that science has nothing to say about whether it is right or wrong to pick your neighbor's pocket or cut his throat. Dennett clearly demurs from the notion of circumscribing science's application (he argues that there is indeed a pertinent evolutionary ethics); and he more or less accuses Gould of hypocrisy, pandering to religion, and pulling his punches. I find this lamentable because it (to my mind) needlessly over-states the alleged incompatibility between the findings of science and those discourses by which we ask more ultimate questions; and there will be plenty on the other side to take him at his word. That Dennett does *not* pull his punches thus turns out to be a bit of an ambiguous virtue. But the force with which he states his position clearly indicates what Dennett feels to be the stakes. Even if, like me, you disagree, the book will force you to make clear to yourself what those stakes are. ( )

Dopo aver faticosamente raggiunto l'ultima pagina de "Il cigno nero", saggio inutilmente pretenzioso il cui autore sembra considerarsi l'unico agente razionale in un mondo di poveri idioti, ecco una boccata d'ossigeno.
Straordinariamente colto, ironico, preparatissimo, Dennet accompagna il lettore in un viaggio dove scienza e filosofia, biologia e spiritualità si intrecciano, dove l'argomentazione rigorosa si accompagna sempre alla voglia di capire e farsi capire. La sintesi migliore attualmente in commercio dei concetti fondamentali del darwinismo e delle loro conseguenze. ( )

Complex and Entertaining: While Dennett comes off, at times, sounding pompous and headstrong, that may simply be because he is, in my opinion, correct about certain aspects of the human mind's ability to cope with conflicting beliefs. My personal religious beliefs aside, I do feel that, at a point, religion and evolutionary science do come into direct conflict. Some of Dennett's thoughts and ideas, in conjunction with Dawkins's ideas, can run a little wayward of what I would call science, but simply because the ideas are blended with speculation and opinion. For further reading on the evolutionary perspective of religious thought, I would recommend Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer. Again, I really enjoyed the book, my personal disagreements notwithstanding.

Wonderful book shedding a objective look at evolution. To be fair, Dennet does a nice job of explaining what evolution and natural selection is and what it is not. His compare and contrast with God is not on the same level of sophistication. ( )

Cranes or skyhooks? I'm an unabashed crane man myself.

Dennett explores the wider implications of Darwin's theory of natural selection. We get lucid summaries of the current debates on Natural Selection as a logical algorithm or philosophical approach, we are introduced to the mindboggingly complex library of Mendel and a quick tour of many of the biological challenges to Darwin's ideas and why they are now disregarded, finally a section on mind, meaning, maths and morality which is incredibly thought provoking.

Dennett's style is careful and deliberate with as much thought given to the structure of his argument as the style of his prose. This is fortunate as he tackles some areas of thought in which it would be very easy to lose your way. I read this book a little while ago whilst on holiday and would recommend taking it in in fairly big chunks otherwise you will yourself having to constantly recap his complex arguments.

In fact it's so good - you don't even mind that a lot of what he covers is actually philosophy.

Ultimately Dennett aims o show that Darwin's theory and everything it tells us about the world around us is life affirming and how it can help to bring meaning to life.

A cracking good read. ( )

This fascinating, difficult book has a simple premise: evolution describes a colossal series of individual, algorithmic steps, none of which is accompanied by any specific intention or intelligence.

At first glance this proposition seems non-controversial but, as Dennett makes very clear, the implications of this theory being right are anything but: once you accept this fundamental premise, the ground under certain positions on a number of other hoary old philosophical chestnuts begins to give way:

* God - if there's no need for intentionality or intelligence at any point in the evolutionary process, then as Oolon Colluphid might say, "That about wraps it up for God" - there's no room at the inn (ahem) for *any* God (omnipotent or otherwise) as a creator of the universe, and since religious claims to ethical validity derive from God's status as both the creator and "ruler" of the universe, they too evaporate in a puff of logic;

* Mind/AI - if we evolved from organisms which do not have any form of consciousness, and that process did not itself involve intentionality or intelligence (until the arrival of human intelligence, which Dennett would describe as a "crane") then any account of consciousness *must* be wholly explicable in physical terms, and (though Dennett doesn't say this) it must be conceptually possible, with the correct technology (which we may of course never have), to synthesise not just the functional equivalent of consciousness, but actual consciousness itself.

This second point (but not the extrapolation) is the central thesis of Dennett's equally excellent (and difficult) book "Consciousness Explained". In many ways, I wish I had read Darwin's Dangerous Idea first, for the premises on which Dennett's account of consciousness are based are set out here in a great deal of depth. I don't think I fully "got" Consciousness Explained first time, so I am going to read it again now. After I've read a cheap and trashy thriller first, as a treat for being so good.

As you progress through Darwin's Dangerous Idea, having unequivocally lost the ideas of God and a "soul", a further order of things which are very central to civilisation as we know it start to collapse as well, most notably the ideas that there are external concepts of "right" and "wrong" at all.

Throughout the first three quarters of the book, Dennett is thoroughly persuasive, with the assistance of Richard Dawkins' wonderful idea of the "meme" (which is a great meme in itself); the idea which reproduces itself and mutates within and between human brains: Just as organisms do, "fit" memes find currency and reproduce with ease; and "weak" memes aren't able to occupy enough brains, and eventually die out.

It is analogies like these that display the power of the idea: the Darwinist meme has outgrown biology and is finding application (for which read: reproducing and mutating) in epistemology, ethics, sociology, economics and pretty much every other academic discipline when you stop to think about it. The implications for this, as a unificatory theory of everything, are immense.

Having said all this, Darwin's Dangerous Idea is not without its faults.

At times Dennett is needlessly provocative, and skirts dangerously close to ad hominem arguments in his dismissal of certain competing commentators, most notably Stephen Jay Gould. By being so he gives the impression of not being dispassionate (apologies, by the way, for the double negative, but I mean something different to "passionate"!) about the subject at hand. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it leads a sceptical reader to question how fairly opposing arguments may have been set out: unless one has read the competing works (and I certainly haven't) for all we know, Dennett may be rendering straw men or at least underselling the points lined up against him.

More curiously, having already picked fights with the religious, the spiritualists and the Marxist biologists, rather late in the piece Dennett wades into the ethics debate. He might have been better advised to leave morality for another time. His final two chapters purport to apply the "universal acid" of Darwinism to ethics. You would expect this to be a rout, but after noting (quite correctly) that between them such great minds as Hobbes, Mill, Kant and Rawls failed utterly to formulate any sort of method for adjudicating right and wrong, Dennett reaches not the obvious conclusion that there is no such thing (which seems to me to be the plain implication of everything the evolutionary theory stands for), but instead puts failures of moral judgment down to insufficient information at the time of judgment formation (one never knows *all* the facts, so one can't be expected to get it right) and ventures the suggestion that there is an evolutionarily explicable moral code, but we just can't always access it.

It is not clear why he even thinks this is necessary, especially since the very lesson of evolutionary biology is that it's quite possible for something extremely clever to come about by a concatenated series of not very clever steps. If this is enough to get humans from protoplasm to cave man, I couldn't fathom what Dennett's interest was in defending the notion that from cave man forwards, humans have needed some externally derived conduct code, especially when the one thing which is undeniable from recorded history is that that competing civilisations have never progressed their cause by being nice to each other. The final two chapters in my view can therefore be skipped without significant loss.

All in all, and notwithstanding these minor grumbles, I think this is an extremely valuable and thought-provoking book. ( )

Say what you will about the shameless adaptationism at the heart of the book, it's brilliant. The range and depth of the ideas Dennett discusses is huge, yet the book coheres. There's more than enough high-grade philosophy for philosophically-minded readers, yet Dennett's grasp of the science is more than adequate for his argument to impress and challenge practicing biologists and zoologists. One can come away from this book with an importantly new view of the world even without accepting the "fundamentalism" underpinning Dennett's argument. ( )

Read this a while ago. Very thought provoking. Very clearly delineates between naturalistic, Darwinian thinking and the supernatural ('skyhook' as Dennett puts it). Agree with almost everything, I just remember it seemed a bit over the top in some places. But need to reread it... ( )

Not a skip-through-the-pages read! But an excellent explanation of what evolution really is. ( )

It would have been a much better use of time to read Dawkins "The Blind Watchmaker". Dennett seems like he has an axe to grind and does so by attempting to inundate the reader with details.

Fascinating at times, but mired in minutia. ( )

One of the best books on Darwinism, and some of its detractors. Simply a must read. ( )

A brilliant exposition of the theory of evolution - so powerful and simple but so often poorly understood, if thought about at all. This book sets it all straight. ( )

Playful examination of the evolution theory ( )

http://everything2.com/?node_id=17220... ( )

Dennett is an unapologetic neo-Darwinist, in the same camp as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. In this book, he discusses the philosophical implications of evolution by natural selection. Interesting topics of discussion include skyhooks, adaptationism, and mimetics.

Explores the nature of evolution and life from a fundamental perspective. Fascinating and enlightening. ( )