Daniel Dennett’s fertile imagination is captivated by the very dangerous idea that the neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution should become the basis for what amounts to an established state religion of scientific materialism. In his new book on the subject, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Dennett, who is director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and a prominent philosopher of science, takes the scientific part of his thesis from the inner circle of contemporary Darwinian theorists: William Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, George C. Williams, and the brilliant popularizer Richard Dawkins. When Dennett describes the big idea emanating from this circle as dangerous, he does not mean that it is dangerous only to religious fundamentalists. The persons whom he accuses of flinching when faced with the full implications of Darwinism are scientists and philosophers of the highest standing: Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, Jerry Fodor, John Searle, and especially Stephen Jay Gould.
Each one of these very secular thinkers supposedly tries, as the simple religious folk do, to limit the all-embracing logic of Darwinism. Dennett describes Darwinism as a “universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.” One thinker after another has tried unsuccessfully to find some way to contain this universal acid, to protect something from its corrosive power. Why? First let’s see what the idea is.
Dennett begins his account with John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding(1689).
