Darwin in Chile

2009 is the Year of Darwin. Born in 1809, it is the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Earlier this year, I went to an interesting lecture series here in Chile that talked about the intellectual legacy of Darwin in the 21st century. I only was able to hear four of the lectures (Dennett, Cosmides, Tooby, and Pinker), but recently came across some good coverage of the event. Finding the coverage by Edge brought to mind some fun quotes from Dennett that I wanted to share.

He discussed the importance of the "strange inversion of reasoning" [description of natural selection by a critic of Darwin in 1868] that "in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it," or rather, that something can have the appearance of design without being consciously designed. I think that he is correct in his assessment of the importance of that element of natural selection, and that the lecture has more of an introductory tone that some of the others which are more focused. He begins with examples of complexity from single celled organisms and animals and goes on to discuss humans, language, ideas, and culture.

"Why was Darwin's idea so great? It united the world of purposeless causation with the world of meaning. From physics to ethics and poetry in one unified perspective."

"Our natural tendency to interpret all design as top-down, as representation-driven, is both anachronistic and anthropocentric." By this he means that humans are the first "intelligent designers" and when we see that in other things, we are projecting what modern humans would do onto older processes without conscious design.