Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Abstract

In laborious detail, Dennett argues that Darwin and his true followers have now demonstrated conclusively that biological evolution is an inherently meaningless process. Mathematically speaking, evolution takes place, Dennett goes on to say, in an open-ended “Design Space” comprised of all the logically possible forms of life. According to Dawkins, atheism has found in Darwin’s ideas the firmest intellectual foundation it has ever had. Dennett and Dawkins in particular have given fresh verbalization to a position that is by no means new, and so there has been no lack of response to it. It is true that evolution is not just about competition and wasteful struggle. Nevertheless, even if their renditions of Darwinism are one-sided, they highlight aspects of evolution-especially its apparent randomness, blind experimentation, and impersonality-that are present at least to some degree in most other contemporary scientific renderings of the story of life.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.