Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Book

TIll today I have never blogged although I daily read blogs by various technical folks who write about Java and Ruby. I have always wanted to blog but did not feel comfortable with the idea till now. I felt that I had no interesting thoughts to share. Besides it seemed to me that everthing interesting had already been written by someone else!!

So what has changed, since then? Have I any remarkable insights to offer? Nope. Why else does this blog exist? Because I wanted it to. Whim. That is all there is to my motivation.

Most of my blog contain links to articles in wikipedia. Nature recently conducted a survey comparing of the quality of science articles in Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. Although it is not surprising that there were errors in the articles published in both, what is interesting is that quality of wikipedia articles was very high. I personally feel that when one restricts oneself to topics that are non-controversial, topics were the author's opinion are not relevant, the quality of information available can be very high.

That said, I have chosen to start my blog with a perennial favorite of mine (yes I have read this book more than once).

Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meanings of Life - by Daniel Dennett

Rather than write a review myself, I refer the reader to one by John Maynard Smith in NY Times.

If you are a Darwinist and have any doubts or are unable to articulate a good argument when confronted by religious people with the usual set of questions or comments, please read this book and also refer them to this book. What I particularly like about this book (besides the content of course) is the title "Evolution and the Meaning of life". A great book with a grand title. I particularly liked another reviewer's comments "As long as I can remember, I've been a Darwinist ...... The problem with convictions is, however, that without a basis in knowledge, they become dogma - perhaps unshakable, but certainly immune to learning. As a non-biologist, it follows that Darwinism for me is more an article of faith than a feature of my intellectual landscape. Daniel C. Dennett undertakes to give people like me a more secure grounding....."

A very interesting analogy that he makes is between "skyhooks" and "cranes". A "skyhook" is feature used in old greek plays when gods would magically descend into the scene and save the hero. This usually meant that the author ran out of ideas and decided to invoke a miracle. Most mythologies are full of skyhooks. Now "cranes" are structures that permit the construction of entities of greater complexity but which are themselves founded solidly "on the ground" of physical science. You are allowed to use "cranes" in any scientific explanation, but "skyhooks" are verboten.

Using several thought experiments, Dr.Dennett demonstrates that there can be no distinction between "real" meaning and "artificial" meaning, that ultimately all meaning emerges from meaningless processes. This thought helped me a lot, I used to agonize over the purpose of life, mine naturally. We may have been born with a purpose in life, but that reason is always assigned in my opinion in hind sight after one's life is over. Purpose in life I feel evolves over time and is always due to continuous interaction with life itself!! Pardon me if this is all sophomoric.

A person familiar with computer science will find it interesting when Dr. Dennett refers to Natural Selection as a algorithmic process.

If you are a fan of the following authors; Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, John Searle, E.O. Wilson, and Roger Penrose (their scientific as opposed to their political views) this book will force you to re-evaluate your earlier opinions.

List of reviews and other related links

1. John Maynard Smith
2. Danny Yee
3. Helge