It was Nicholas Copernicus who first proposed, in 1853, that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but it, in fact, revolved around the sun. It took over a century for the idea to sink in — a gradual and rather agonising transformation. The Darwinian perestroika has been no different, notwithstanding the fact that the old world, as the good bishops thought, crashed to pieces with the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Yet, after 136 years following Charles Darwin’s death, one is yet to come to terms with its mind-boggling implications.
Agreed, that, science has been exemplarily global in the development and progression of the Darwinian doctrine, unlike the Copernican proposition which did not fascinate public attention early on. What is, however, most remarkable in the Darwinian mind-set is its monumental strength; a power that was and is being recognised instantly by scientists, thinkers, and others, who have also been taking sides ever since Darwin’s brilliant musings saw the light of the day — what with large gaps in his theory having recently been filled in.
One may also, likewise, ‘picture’ Immanuel Kant’s famous credo of the possibility of apes becoming men, just as much as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that species had evolved from simpler forms by the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse; or, for that matter, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s articulation of the ‘metamorphosis’ of plants. Flash-forward. This leads us to Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, published exactly 30 years ago, which bids fair to one inescapable fact. Writes Dennett, the distinguished Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, US: “The Darwinian revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the other… In a single stroke, the idea of natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law… [It’s] not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea… [because] not only does Darwin’s dangerous idea apply to us directly, and at many levels, but the proper application of Darwinian thinking to human issues — of mind, language, knowledge, and ethics, for instance — illuminates them in ways that have eluded the traditional approaches, recasting ancient problems and pointing to their solutions.”
John Locke, the renowned empiricist, often took ‘refuge’ in one of philosophy’s most ancient and superfluously used maxims: nothing can come from nothing. In Locke’s time — which was also René Descartes’ — the fundamental idea of artificial intelligence [AI] was unthinkable, if the mind must come first. The birth of AI, on the other hand, was all but prophesied by Darwin himself, a classical, paradigmatically amazing proof, or evidence, of the formal power of natural selection. If this wasn’t genius, what is?
As Dennett observes: “Darwin [showed] us how to climb from ‘Absolute Ignorance’ to creative genius without begging any questions… The truth of Darwinism [is] that you and I are Mother Nature’s artefacts, but our intentionality is nonetheless real for being the effect of millions of years of mindless, algorithmic R&D, instead of a gift from the high… The generations of adaptations and the generations of diversity were different aspects of a single complex phenomenon — the unifying insight was the principal of natural selection.”
Dennett claims that there is nothing ‘sacred’ in the traditional sense of the word. He also explains how Darwin’s theory of natural selection, scientific in every way possible, extends far beyond biology. In so doing, Dennett, the celebrated author of yet another notable tome, Consciousness Explained, lays bare several current controversies about the origin of life, punctuated ‘balance,’ sociobiology, the evolution of language and culture, and evolutionary ethics. His inferences are surprising, yet powerful and illuminating… or, even deeply persuading of Darwinism’s signal fact that evolution by natural selection is vital to the future of philosophy. Not all readers of the book under scrutiny would be thoroughly convinced of the ‘opuses’ espoused by Dennett; but, most will be the better for it — informed, entertained and provoked by his articulating, albeit non-conformist points-of-view.
To highlight a case in point from the book:
“In many contexts, if you bring up evolution, people wince. Many fear the controversy [Charles] Darwin’s theory has generated, or the threat they think evolution poses to their religious beliefs. And you might well wonder: is there room for awe, faith or spirituality in a world defined by evolution? The answer is yes — but to find it, you need to understand evolution and the revolution in thought that it implies. Start with this observation: scientists almost universally accept the theory of evolution. It cuts across disciplines. It explains many elements of life. Other scientific fields support it, from geology to genetic engineering. Evolution is essential to human understanding of the biological universe. It is the centre about which all else turns.”
To ‘cull’ another exemplar:
“The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists… 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.”
This isn’t all. One could also, in a related framework, think of its impact in the current COVID-19 context; also tempest. The fact is Darwin’s theory in layman’s perimeter of thought elicits popular resistance. This is, in no way, related to one’s religious belief. The obvious point is most of us may not like to embrace the idea that we descended from apes. This generalised view is apparently a ‘spin-off’ of human pride, if not vanity. There’s also yet another underpinning to the whole background. Evolution, as all of us know, is a deviation; it is as much related to inheritance just as much as to selection by the environment and, most importantly, time. The process, from the human perspective, obviously needs abundant time. For certain species, however, there is no such thing as time because they may not have the privilege to witness evolution in action. Not for most microbes though. Just think of the good, ‘old’ flu, swine flu, MRSA, among others, including the latest scourge, coronavirus. They all epitomise ‘evolution in action’ — in other words, yet another resilient evidence of Darwin’s revolutionary, also dangerous, idea.
Dennett dwells, and rightly so, upon the tremendous rebirth of religious fundamentalism — the most dangerous force of all on this planet. He writes, “Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.” Interspersed with such thoughts, Dennett counters Darwin’s dangerous idea — an idea which helps to create a condition in the memosphere [mem = unit of cultural transmission] — one that in the long run threatens to be just as toxic to [these] memes as civilisation, in general, has been inimical to the large wild animals. Says Dennett, “Save the elephants! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not by forcing the people of Africa live nineteenth-century lives, for instance. [We] must find an accommodation. [And, what’s more] safety demands that religions be put in cages too — like animals which are dangerous — when absolutely necessary.”
In what appears to be the most fascinating raison d’être of Dennett’s work is this fact: that Darwin’s idea is much more than a universal solvent or panacea, capable of cutting right into the heart of everything in sight… where traditional details perish. Some loss, yes — but, good riddance to the rest of them. What remains is more than enough to build upon. Argues Dennett, “We now have a much better sense of what a Darwinian algorithm is than Darwin ever dreamt of… Intrepid reverse engineering has brought us to the point where we can confidently assess rival claims about exactly what happened where on this planet billions of years ago. The miracles of life and consciousness turn out to be even better that we imagined when we were sure they were inexplicable.”
If inference of adaptation is usually the basis of a genetic story, adaptive, and genetic, Darwinism is a theory of genetic change and variation in population. “Fortunately for us” says Dennett, “Darwin was not politically correct.” So also pantheism. It has variety, but lacks ‘convincing’ explanation. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza called his highest being god, or nature. And, Darwin? Darwin expatiated his marvellous credo as distribution of design throughout nature, creating in the ‘Tree of Life’ an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation, “an actual pattern in the immeasurable reaches of Design Space that could not be duplicated exactly in its many details.” Darwin thought and, perforce, rightly too, that this design work just happened, not miraculously or even instantaneously, but slowly, over billions of years — a wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels. Did this ‘Tree of Life’ create itself, where one could pray, or fear? Probably not. Dennett echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s wisdom: “I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence.” Ditto, for human life. A human life worth living is not something that can be indisputably measured, and that’s its glory too.
Darwin provided enormous support to the maxim, nature does not make leaps. Well, nothing can describe evolution better than the closing sentence of Darwin’s magnum opus: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into new forms or into one; and, that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
In the course of his eminently readable book, Dennett gives a kaleidoscopic view of several paradigms: of good, and some not so good, including a host of foibles. One example: the makers of Jurassic Park, a fantasy, according to Dennett, never addressed the problem of the DNA-reader at all, and used frog DNA just to patch the missing parts of the dinosaur DNA. Dennett quotes an authority who says that this was an interesting error — because, humans are more closely related to dinosaurs than either is to frogs.
Human DNA would, therefore, have been better than frog DNA; bird DNA would have been better still. If Darwin, reading Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on Population, conceived the motif of applying to all organisms the Malthusian hypothesis that populations tend to increase faster than the means of subsistence, Dennett is cock-a-hoop with Darwin’s own notion of the fittest a la Kant’s pragmatism and ‘practical reason,’ or Schopenhauer’s exaltation of the will. To Dennett, Darwin is not only the Amerigo Vespucci of his age, and beyond, but something of its Christopher Columbus too. Darwin, quite simply, holds a great promise. His idea is so cogent, notes Dennett, that it is pre-eminently suitable to put our most cherished visions of life on a new foundation: “[Because] almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be… The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists.”
So, what is that truly dangerous aspect of Darwin’s ideas? Dennett’s riposte, the essential theme song of his lucid work is: “Seductiveness… Second-rate versions of the fundamental ideas continue to bedevil us, so we must keep a clean watch, correcting each other as we go. The only way of avoiding the mistakes is to learn from the mistakes we have already made.” Yes, Dennett is obsessed with the enchanting, highly logical apotheosis of Darwinian composites, but he isn’t blind, or averse, to judgment. He offers his readers, through his thoughtful tome, the choice — balancing Darwinism, or rejecting it, and fighting on, being ever so vigilant against the seduction of Darwin’s ground-breaking ideas, evolution and the meaning of life.
His bottom line: you be the judge.
— First published in Biblio: A Review of Books
