Daniel Dennett Quotes About Evolution

Quotes about: Evolution

• To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.

  Daniel Dennett

  Writing, People, Doubt

  Daniel C. Dennett (1996). “Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life”, p.56, Penguin UK

• Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by 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 is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.

  Daniel Dennett

  Ideas, Space, Awards

  "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life". Book by Daniel Dennett, 1995.

• We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

  Daniel Dennett

  Decision, World, Quests

  "Freedom Evolves". Book by Daniel Dennett, 2003.

• I have shown that those who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore the evolutionary accounts of human mentality: if human minds are non-miraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense, artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately mechanical explanation. We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we can do is beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros.

  Daniel Dennett

  Mind, Evolution, Assembly

• Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

  Daniel Dennett

  Evolution, Language, Genealogy

  "Daniel Dennett: 'I don't like theory of mind' - interview". Interview With Carole Jahme, www.theguardian.com. March 22, 2013.

• The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.

  Daniel Dennett

  Way, Evolution, Reason

• The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

  Daniel Dennett

  Paleontology, Branches, Molecular Biology

• Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

  Daniel Dennett

  Successful, Design, Evolution

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