In the Light of Evolution Volume III: Two Centuries of Darwin (2009) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
17 Darwin's "Strange Inversion of Reasoning"--Daniel Dennett
17 Darwin's "Strange Inversion of Reasoning"--Daniel Dennett
Pages 343-354
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 343... ...
Together, these ideas help to explain how we human intelligences came to be able to discern the reasons for all of the adaptations of life, including our own. TWO STRANGE INVERSIONS OF REASONING S ome of the most important thinkers we philosophers take seriously were not philosophers but scientists -- newton, einstein, Gödel, and Turing, for instance -- but by far the scientist who has made the greatest contribution to philosophy is Charles Darwin.
|
From page 344... ...
When we turn to Darwin's bubble-up theory of creation, we can conceive of all of the creative design work metaphorically as lifting in Design space. it has to start with the simplest replicators, and gradually ratchet up, by wave after wave of natural selection, to multicellular life in all its forms.
|
From page 345... ...
They have been searching for a "skyhook," something that floats high in Design space, unsupported by ancestors, the direct result of a special act of intelligent creation. And time zpq9990983390001.g.tif and again, these skeptics have discovered not a miraculous skyhook but a wonderful "crane," a nonmiraculous innovation in Design space that enables ever more efficient exploration of the possibilities of design, ever more powerful lifting in Design space.
|
From page 346... ...
takes a strikingly different tack: he wholeheartedly accepts adaptationism but still thinks that human minds are inexplicable as a product of natural selection unaided by the intelligence of a Christian God. PLANTINGA'S ATTEMPTED REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM OF NATURALISM Plantinga also has an explicitly religious foundation for his repugnance, and he covers both kinds of creationism in his attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism (1996, 2009)
|
From page 347... ...
such an appeal to the power of natural selection to design highly reliable information-gathering organs would be in danger of vicious circularity were it not for the striking confirmations of these achievements of natural selection using independent engineering measures. The acuity of vision in the eagle and hearing in the owl, the discriminatory powers of electric eels and echolocating bats, and many other cognitive talents in humans and other species have all been objectively measured, for instance.
|
From page 348... ...
The greater complexity of the resulting eukaryotes permitted greater versatility, allowing for the sorts of division of labor that enabled multicellularity to evolve. (As lukeš et al., Chapter 4, this volume, show, the evolution of multicellularity also involved reducing the complexity of prokaryotic replication methods, which were temporally and energetically too inefficient to support the profligate cell division of viable multicellular organisms.)
|
From page 349... ...
. zpq9990983390002.g.tif FiGUre 17.3 lobster trap diagram, exhibiting design features similar to those of the caddis larva food sieve (see Fig.
|
From page 350... ...
This is Turing's strange inversion uncovered in nature. There is a common tendency to overinterpret animals exhibiting such clever behaviors, imputing to them much more comprehension than they need, or have, and an equally common tendency, in reaction, to underestimate them.
|
From page 351... ...
As richerson and Boyd (2006) show, in addition to the standard highway, the vertical transmission of genes, a second information highway from parents to offspring is evolvable under rather demanding conditions; and once this path of vertical cultural transmission is established and optimized, it can be invaded by "rogue cultural variants," horizontally or obliquely transmitted cultural items that do not have the same probability of being benign.
|
From page 352... ...
This is an instance of nonmiraculous bootstrapping, and it has occurred many times. There is a finite regress leading back to the earliest relatively primitive and inaccurate straightedges, but, over time, straightedges have been manufactured to ever more demanding tolerances.
|
From page 353... ...
science is a culturally transmitted and maintained system of truth-tracking that has identified and rectified literally hundreds of imperfections in our animal equipment, and yet it is not itself a skyhook, a gift from God, but a product of adapta tions, a fruit on the tree of life. That is, in outline, the response to Plantinga's premise (MacKenzie, 1868)
|
From page 354... ...
of getting over there, to what Because we can represent this state of affairs (in diagrams or words -- you don't need to use adaptive landscape sketches, but they often help) , we can, for the first time, "see" some of the peaks beyond the valleys, and thereby are motivated to devise ways of traversing those valleys.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.