The Philosophical Legacy of Darwin

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that began at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
Today: the philosophical legacy of Charles Darwin.

John Perry
You know, Ken, Darwin was many things, but not really a philosopher. He was he was what used to be called a naturalist. We’d call him a biologist today, but he was also a geologist, and he studied medicine and even study for the clergy. He first became famous as an author because of his book, “The Voyage of the Beagle.” It was simultaneously a scientific journal, and a riveting travel memoir he had, he had a five year journey to remote places like the Galapagos Islands. But of course, he’s mainly remembered now for coming up with a theory of evolution by natural selection.

Ken Taylor
It’s precisely because of the theory of evolution, that it’s fair to talk about the philosophical legacy of Darwin, the theory of evolution is one of the single most important ideas in the history of biology, maybe even in the entire history of science. And some people there are people who believe that it’s the single most important idea in the entire history, the entire history of human civilization.

John Perry
Well, I don’t know if I go that far. I mean, there’s the wheel, there’s language, there’s even God that that was a pretty influential idea. But there’s no doubt that Darwin had a major impact on our understanding of the nature of life and its meaning.

Ken Taylor
Go back to that idea about God, I mean, consider the infamous design argument for the existence of God. It begins with the observation of life’s orderliness, complexity and apparent purposefulness, it adds that therefore life could not to a very high degree of probability, be the result of random accident. And it concludes that in all likelihood, life must have been created and designed by a wiser, intelligent designer, ie God.

John Perry
Well, long before Darwin can both your buddy Kant and my buddy Hume gave powerful criticisms of the design argument.

Ken Taylor
Well, I’m not trying to claim that the design argument is philosophically irrefutable or that nobody before Darwin ever requested it. You’re right about a you but until Darwin, the design argument represented by far, I think, the best positive idea that anybody had for explaining the complexity and apparent purposefulness of life rejected as a design argument before Darwin, and you’re left with one huge and imponderable mystery John, but Darwin changed all that. He showed how blind purposeless unintelligent processes could explain all living things and all their complexity and in their apparent purposefulness.

John Perry
That blind purposeless unintelligent process is the process of natural selection. Natural selection means that traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce, get passed down from generation to generation.

Ken Taylor
Right, at the basic level, natural selection results in the interaction of three different things, variation, heritability and differential reproduction.

John Perry
Imagine you start out with a population of beetles say, say half of them are green, and half of them are brown—that’s variation.

Ken Taylor
Suppose that the brown beetles tend to have brown babies and green beetles tend to have green babies—that’s heritability.

John Perry
And finally, suppose that our beetles live among a species of beetle eating birds, but that our birds are better at spotting the green beetles than the brown beetles. Green beetles are thus more likely to end up as bird food and less likely to end up making more green beetle babies. That’s differential reproduction.

Ken Taylor
And now let this whole process of birds and feeding run for a few cycles or maybe many cycles, and eventually you have a population of beetles that’s no longer 5050, brown, green, but more brown than green.

John Perry
Darwin showed that if you have just those three things variation, heritability and differential reproduction, then natural selection will occur. And he argued that natural selection is the main process by which species and our traits are designed, quote, designed by relentless tinkering with species natural selection causes them to be adapted to their environment.

Ken Taylor
Darwinian explanations are everywhere these days, Jonathan, and a lot of them are cool, but but, but not all of them are cool. I mean, think of so called Social Darwinism. That’s a very crude ideology. And people sometimes say, Well, look. It’s the survival of the fittest. Darwin taught us that so they tried to justify social hierarchy and social domination by appeal to that idea.

John Perry
Well, or think of the more sophisticated but still very controversial hypotheses of evolutionary psychologists, like the idea that men are evolved to have a certain propensity towards rape. That’s the kind of thing that makes people reflexively reject or winning approach.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, you know, there’s a lot to sort through here, the good and the bad about Darwin.

John Perry
Luckily, to help us think through the philosophical implications of Darwin’s legacy, we’re gonna be joined by Daniel Dennett. He’s the author of many books inspired by Darwinian ideas, including one of my favorites, “Freedom Evolves.”

Ken Taylor
And we’d like our audience to help this conversation evolve as well join us by calling 1-800-525-9917 that’s 1-800-525-9917 or send us an email to comments@philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
But first, our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Molly Samuel, explains why it’s no coincidence that Darwin came up with his theory of evolution after traveling to the Galapagos Islands. She filed this report.

Molly Samuel
I’m on a rocky, windswept Hill on the eastern side of California Sierra Nevada mountains with biologist Lyle Nichols of Santa Monica College .

Lyle Nichols
…over here. So we’re looking into Nevada. We’re just a few miles from the border here. So most of this is in Nevada.

Molly Samuel
We’re in Bodie State Historic Park, a goldmine and ghost town looking for pikas, which are small, cute squeaking hamster-sized relatives of rabbits.

Lyle Nichols
They’re sort of shaped like a beanbag.

Molly Samuel
The American pika is picky when it comes to choosing a home. They’re sensitive to heat and only live at high elevations in the western states. They live in rock piles, hiding out beneath them when it gets too hot. They spend their days collecting grass and shrubs making hay piles to eat during the winter. Nichols comes to Bodie in the summers to count the papers.

Lyle Nichols
There are four animals on this one. And there are two good hay piles that you can see here and these guys have been really active.

Molly Samuel
So what are these little mammals living in the high, cold Bodie hills have to do with Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands?

Terry Gosliner
We do have habitat islands all around us.

Molly Samuel
Terry Gosliner is a scientist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Terry Gosliner
And one of the things that we find is that mountain tops are habitat islands.

Molly Samuel
What makes islands special is their isolation. Islands have plants and animals that are different from their cousins living anywhere else: Galapagos tortoises, Tasmanian Devils, Hawaii’s honey creepers. Gosliner explains that after his voyage on the Beagle, Darwin noticed this phenomenon.

Terry Gosliner
He was very familiar with habitats in South America, which allowed him to then see that the many of the organisms that he was seeing in the Galapagos Islands had close relatives on the South American mainland, but the island were very different.

Molly Samuel
By comparing these species to each other, Darwin saw that the various plants and animals were related but had evolved into separate species. He eventually arrived at natural selection as the mechanism that drives evolution.

Terry Gosliner
That’s why we call islands living laboratories of evolution.

Molly Samuel
They’re like evolutionary petri dishes narrow, isolated examples that demonstrate how evolution works everywhere else. island life can be pretty good, but because of the isolation islands are also laboratories for extinction.

Terry Gosliner
And then these days of climate change and other huge conservation issues. The organisms that live on islands are the ones that are most likely to become extinct most quickly.

Molly Samuel
And here’s where the pikas come in. Those cool mountain tops in this year in Nevada might as well be islands as far as pikas are concerned. The animals can’t survive at lower altitudes in environments that don’t have their preferred rockpile homes.

Lyle Nichols
Pika is a really cold adapted animals.

Molly Samuel
Lyle Nichols.

Lyle Nichols
Once the temperature gets much above 20 degrees C which is room temperature, you know, they’re not active on the surface, they’ll be gone in the rocks where it’s cooler.

Molly Samuel
The pikas at Bodie are an unusual population. They live in the rock piles created by old gold mining operations. So in their case, human impact on the environment has actually been a good thing—to a point. Terry Gosliner of the California Academy of Sciences reminds us of the problem with island like isolation.

Terry Gosliner
If you think of organisms that are found only in the highest mountaintops, they have no place to go. They are going to become extinct if we continue to see the impact of climate change that everyone predicts

Molly Samuel
Some scientists, including Lyle Nichols, think that pika populations are already shrinking because of warmer temperatures.

Lyle Nichols
Any fresh droppings… So I think we’re safe saying this one’s—this territory doesn’t have anybody on it.

Molly Samuel
The effects of climate change may not be obvious everywhere. But just as islands show Darwin where species came from now islands and island like places are showing us where the planet could be going. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Molly Samuel.

John Perry
I’m John Perry, and with me is Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
Our guest is Daniel Dennett. He’s Professor of Philosophy from Tufts University, where he’s also co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. And he’s author of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.” Dan, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Daniel Dennett
It’s good to be with you again.

John Perry
Dan, you’re a philosopher. At least that’s how you started out. Now you’re many things, but you really weren’t trained as an evolutionary biologist. But obviously you find Darwin philosophically fascinating. Did thinking about the problems of philosophy leads you into thinking about Darwin?

Daniel Dennett
In fact, it did, John. When I was just starting out, I was thinking about learning in the brain. And it hit me that it had to be a sort of quasi evolutionary process, a Darwinian process and in the neurons, and that got me interested in Darwin right there. And the more I read, the more I thought, These are wonderful ideas, and they, they illuminate just about everything that I was interested in.

John Perry
When I the title of your book, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” suggest that you think Darwin’s ideas are unsafe. Unsafe for whom?

Daniel Dennett
It’s funny, when I published that book, about 15 years ago, people said, why dangerous, they don’t ask me that as often that sort of obvious. Darwin’s idea is more revolutionary than a lot of people are willing to acknowledge or are comfortable with it inverts of a very ancient and very sensible idea. And that is what you might call the trickle down theory of creation that takes a big, fancy, intelligent thing to make something wonderful. And he’s a no, no, in fact, you can have a process which is an intelligence which has no purpose, which is just blind and mechanical. And nevertheless, it will generate over the eons, things of stunning beauty and elegance and of great efficiency, wonderful designs. And, and he demonstrated how it would work. And that really is a very upsetting idea. A lot of people who don’t want themselves religious, nevertheless have great trouble with this.

Ken Taylor
Oh, that’s what I that’s what I wanted to ask you is it only is are these ideas only dangerous to people who are religious who believe that there must be an intelligence at the foundation of the universe? Suppose I’m a thoroughly modern naturalist, and I think it’s all just stuff happening anyway. Is there any danger to me that thoroughly modern naturalist Darwin’s ideas?

Daniel Dennett
Well, I used not to think so. But in fact, one of the main reasons I wrote the wrote the book back then was I found all these people who weren’t religious, who were in fact, some of them scientists, these are academics, who were profoundly unhappy with this aspect of Darwin’s work and and found the whole idea of evolutionary explanations, particularly in you know, in the humanities, somehow deeply repugnant.

Ken Taylor
Now, why would that be, I mean, some of the reaction to what’s called evolutionary psychology, we take the theory of evolution and try to design it to the applied to the design of the human mind really upset some people what why, why is that?

Daniel Dennett
Well, I think it’s a sort of leftover Cartesianism, they still want the mind to be a sort of a mystery. And super Calif, fragile Supercalifragilistic they don’t want it to be just a bunch of tricks. And of course, what you learn from evolution is that living things are wonderful bags of tricks. But when you start looking more closely, you see, that’s all it is, it’s a bag of tricks all the way down. And if that, if that upsets you, then you’re not going to want to see the success of an evolutionary biological theory of mind.

John Perry
So Dan, just a quick answer. Was Darwin himself upset by the unsafe aspects of his idea?

Daniel Dennett
Oh, yeah, that that seems to be the case. I’m not an expert on Darwin biography, but he held off of course, publishing for a long time. His wife, Emma was deeply religious, and he was worried about the effect on her. He understood I think exactly what the implications of his views were.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re discussing Darwin with Dan Dennett, author of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”

John Perry
In our next segment, we’ll dig into the details of this whole alliterative subject, the theory of natural selection and examine what Darwinian approaches can and cannot explain. Can Darwinian thinking really explain why men are prone to rape or how freedom evolved? Are there alternatives to Darwinia approaches? Or is Darwinism now just the only game in town? You can join us by calling toll free 1-800-525-9917. That’s 1-800-525-9917 and you can email us at comments@philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
Darwinism, its limits and its competitors—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk it continues.

The Kinks
I am an apeman.

John Perry
Darwin reduce humans to little more than walking talking philosophy book writing apes, or did his theory of evolution give us a new appreciation for the complexity maybe even the dignity of our species? I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk. How much about life—especially human life—can Darwinian thinking really explain? Can it explain how the mind really works, how freedom or morality arose how human cultures and societies change over time? Are there any serious scientific alternatives to Darwinian approaches? Tell us what you think.

John Perry
The number is 1-800-525-9917. 1-800-525-9917. You can also email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. And finally, you can post a comment to share with the world on our blog, theblog.philosophytalk.org.. Our guest is Dan Dennett, author of “Darwin’s Dangerous Ideas.”

Ken Taylor
So there are people, people who purport to be scientifically grounded, who want to either entirely reject or radically modify or moderately modified Darwin Darwin’s basic approach. They range from people way over on the right say who who favor intelligent design, and others more on the left, say, who think we need more biological processes than just natural selection alone to explain living struck this sort of developmental systems? Tell us Is there any serious scientific controversy about Darwinian ism still remaining?

Daniel Dennett
There’s serious controversy only about the extent to which Darwinism Neo Darwinism has to be adjusted to make room for new discoveries, for instance, in developmental biology, but developmental biology, Evo-Devo, so called is still it’s a new and wonderful wrinkle to Neo Darwinism.

Ken Taylor
Explain Evo-Devo a little bit to our listeners.

Daniel Dennett
Well, perhaps using a couple of caricatures, the caricature of non EVO-Devo Darwinism is, look, you got your genes, and then you got your adults. And the genes are the blueprints for the adults. And how that process happens is of secondary interests. We don’t care you got you got a gene for this and a gene for that. And you find the adults have have those genes. And that’s all we need to talk about? Well, it turns out that the processes of getting from the DNA and the genes and the all the other elements there, through development, there’s a tremendous amount of value added a tremendous amount of fascinating and important process that goes on in development, which means that that we have to complicate our theories of the relationship between the DNA and the living organism.

Ken Taylor
Evo-Devo, people got reject sort of genetic determinism and some people, some people think I think wrongly that Darwinism implies or entails a kind of genetic determinism that it’s all in the genes, because those are the things that are selected and replicated. But there’s more going on. And you say, that’s serious. There’s serious science about that, right? That’s a serious, scientific certainly.

Daniel Dennett
And in any case, even aside from EVO Devo, evolution isn’t all just about genes. There’s cultural evolution as well. And it often doesn’t matter, as it were to nature, whether a particular good trick that an organism has has come through the genes or has has been passed on from parent to offspring, for instance, a lot of behavior of mammals and birds, building their nests, their songs, what they choose to eat, how they how they hunt, their mate preferences, are actually passed on, not through their genes. These used to be called instincts. They’re not, there’s an instinctual basis, but the actual information is passed on from from parent to offspring. And the proof of this is that if you do cross fostering, if you take the birds, the eggs out of one nest, and put them in another species nest and vice versa, so that the chicks grow up with adoptive parents, a lot of their behaviors will be the behavior of their adoptive parents, not of their genetic parents.

John Perry
And in reading about this, which I haven’t done nearly enough of, there’s this concept of a meme that comes up as some kind of Darwinian idea, or based on Darwin that’s going to explain cultural evolution development. Can you say a little bit about that?

Daniel Dennett
Yeah. Richard Dawkins introduced the term in his book The Selfish Gene back in 76. And it’s been very controversial ever since I’m one of those that thinks it’s a very important idea and I love it. I love the idea it’s been given a bad press. It’s been criticized both by people in the in the humanities who, who hate the idea of an evolutionary encroachment into their terrain, and and by some evolutionary biologists who, who think we don’t need anything in addition to the gene. Sometimes I asked them, What about words do you think words exist? And they say of course, words exist. I say, well, words are memes that can be pronounced.

John Perry
So what is the definition of a meme?

Daniel Dennett
A meme is is a cultural replicator that has its features, because it has survived in differential replication, just the way genes do.

Ken Taylor
It’s like the cultural analogue of the gene. But you know, before, but before we get to enter that, which is a fascinating topic, and I want to probe you, I want to give you a chance to discuss another purported scientific controversy about about evolution. And this is intelligent design hypothesis. And you know, I have to say, a little with a little bit despair, one of my favorite philosophers has recently recommended as one of the best books of the year one of these intelligent design office, is that a serious scientific controversy about intelligent design and evolution or not?

Daniel Dennett
No, it’s not. It just isn’t. And, yes, I’m disappointed in Tom Nagel, as well. I think he’s been, surprisingly, for a man of his sophistication. He’s been very naive. He’s taken a book, which is propaganda, which was has not been reviewed by the scientific community at all. And because it’s cleverly written and very engaging, he’s he’s bought it hook line and sinker there.

Ken Taylor
But then that means they’re intelligent, sophisticated people who are gripped by the arguments for intelligent design. Tom Nagel is no fool.

Daniel Dennett
Well, you see, that’s why I wrote my book, that’s why Darwin’s dangerous idea. Some people and He is admitted to me, he just can’t stand the idea that that all of this wonderfulness arises out of a purposeless, blind mechanical process. He says, We’ve got to find some alternative to what he calls reductionism on the one hand and creationism on the other. And I think he’s under estimating the resources. And in fact, the glory of reductionism done right.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about the philosophical legacy of Charles Darwin with Dan Dennett, one of the people in the world best suited to help us understand that legacy. We’d love to have you join this conversation. 1-800-525-9917, that’s 1-800-525-9917, or email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or last but not least go to our blog and post a comment for the world to share at theblog.philosophytalk.org. And Matt in Berkeley is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Matt.

Matt
Thank you. I wanted to say that my undergraduate education was in zoology. So I had a lot of evolution Minmei in my education, and it’s something that informs my view of the world and humanity. But what I am appalled at is how many people who are very well educated. And I had this epiphany come to me when I was in a conversation with two, you know, people who had doctorates from Harvard, how lacking so many people’s, and I’m not talking like just bible thumper types, but educated progressive people, they just don’t understand natural selection. And so they will apply it to, to social situations, and they just, they just simply don’t understand what they’re talking about.

John Perry
Can you give us a concrete example, real quickly?

Matt
I’m gonna try to remember that we were talking about education, and oh, and how things are passed on to generations. And they didn’t really understand the idea of selection. And they were thinking more in terms of like, attitudes, and those kinds of things being passed down. And they didn’t have a distinction between social kind of cultural stuff versus traits that are—

Ken Taylor
Matt, thanks for the question, Dan. I think Matt’s saying he doesn’t like your idea of cultural, cultural evolution. And that sounds like kind of what’s underneath him that you can’t really explain social transmission by the same kind of mechanisms, you can explain biological transmission, but that sounds like what he was objecting to.

Daniel Dennett
Well, maybe you’re right. In any case, let me let me defend and clarify a little bit. For 1000s of years, we’ve known that cultures change over time. So in that minimal sense, they evolve. And we’ve identified lots of cultural treasures, music and art and science and architecture and ways of building boats and all the rest of it. And we know that this is culturally transmitted, and we know that it changes over time. And the big question is, are the processes by which that those changes occur? Are they always as one tradition would have it this sort of under Darwinian tradition, is it always because people appreciate and like what they see and so they, they treat these things as as valuable possessions as treasures to be to be husbanded and then to be bequeath to their next generations? Well, a lot, a lot of culture is of course, transmitted in that way. And and we, and the human comprehension of the items in question is very much at the forefront, but there’s a lot of culture that is not transmitted that way, and is in fact the foundation of the rest of culture. Just take words, not one word and 1000 is coined or invented by an individual words have a clear evolutionary history, they have lineages going back 1000s of years. And they survive by differential replication words that nobody uses go extinct words that everybody uses, stick around, and they subtly change over the years, and not as a result of anybody trying to make them change. That’s cultural evolution, too. And that’s where you need the concept of memes.

John Perry
So, to go back, just a little to the Tom Nagel debate. I don’t really want to talk about Tom Nagel, because I haven’t read Tom Nagel stuff. But I know what my reaction will be. My reaction is always the same. I always agree with what Dan Dennett says, and I agree with what Tom Nagel feels. That is, I mean, you’re you’re great at explaining evolution and rebutting objections to it and making making it all clear. But she also in through so enthusiastic, right, I mean, you really think that that all the all the things about all the important things about human dignity and and our feelings about ourselves and culture, that that have heretofore been based on various kinds of religious and humanistic myths can really be resuscitated within an evolutionary point of view, at least I think you think that? Is that? Right? And can you see how maybe that’s just an expression of your own enthusiastic cup is half full personality, and it might leave some of the rest of us just depressed?

Daniel Dennett
Well, no, I understand that. Exactly. And I think you’ve put it very well. And you’re exactly right about Tom Nagel, he’s, he doesn’t have the arguments, but he’s got a gut that has gut feelings that a lot of people share. And he has the courage to express them and the eloquence to express them quite, quite, quite wonderfully. You’re exactly right, that I don’t think we need the myths, I think we maybe needed the myths that we had to have these myths to embody these wonderful ideas. But I don’t think we need it anymore. For instance, let’s talk about ethics for a moment. I don’t think we need the idea that God tells us what to do one little bit, I don’t think we need God for ethics at all, I think what we need to understand is that we human beings, over the over the eons, have come together and communicated and persuaded each other about what the right way to live is. We haven’t finished that job. But if you compare the morality of today, with the morality of 2000 years ago, you’ll see that it’s not because God, if God changed what he was telling us to do, it’s because people decided that God wasn’t telling us to do the right thing.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, those are important that I’m going to challenge you about that a bit. We’ve got a lot of callers in line. So I’m gonna let some some of them in 1-800-525-9917, that’s 1-800-525-9917, or email us at comments at philosophy talked about O RG, or go to our blog, the blog dot floss, we talked about O RG and leave a comment for the world to see. Jay in San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Jay.

Jay
Thanks. My question is that what would be the evolutionary explanation for our repulsion to the idea of evolution? And what is the evolutionary, you know, explanation for why we’re so attracted to the humanitarian myths? Or the humanist myths like romantic myths?

Ken Taylor
Well, yeah, let’s put that question. Doesn’t have to be your next evolutionary explanation of everything. I know sounds like not plausible candidate to me for an evolutionary explanation. But well,

Daniel Dennett
it all depends. It all depends what you mean by an explanation. I would say that it is puzzling in a way that we should find this so offensive, but I think it’s easy enough to see what the answer might be not that evolution has as yet worked this out in any way. We we human beings, we are the makers, the divisors, the inventors. And this is a wonderful thing that we do. We’re painters and artists and musicians and composers and engineers and all the rest. And we model the whole world, the whole of, as we say, creation, on our own creative talents and abilities. And for Darwin to come along and say, Well, this is a very recent development, this creating from the top down understanding what you’re doing. No other no other species really does that. And evolution itself doesn’t do it. That’s a profoundly upsetting idea. It’s upsetting in the same way. It was upsetting several 100 years ago, to figure out that the that our planet is not the center of the universe.

Ken Taylor
Well, I understand that but I don’t see why evolution has any deep explanation of why we would be upset in the light of the explosion of our myths. We’re mythmaking creatures. I agree about that. And I think evolution You can explain how we came to be mythmaking creatures. But I don’t think I can explain anything about what myths will appeal to us and why they appeal to us. That’s a complicated cultural thing and has to do with all kinds of stuff. So I don’t quite see the evolutionary explanation there yet.

Daniel Dennett
Well, maybe maybe this is one of those cases where you don’t want an evolutionary explanation because it’s really better explained it at a at a higher level, where we’ve got evolution presupposes a background.

John Perry
Well I mean, isn’t it pretty obvious, it’s just that that people who reject the myths of their community don’t get slept with as often as people who embrace them.

Ken Taylor
Well that depends—suffering artists who rejected their community get slept with quite a lot!

Daniel Dennett
There was a there was a little news piece just today and the paper I saw where somebody’s done an experiment, where men and women I think, probably undergraduates, male, female, as usual, were shown little descriptions, resumes of other people of their same gender. In other words, you were basically being introduced to some of your sexual rivals in these in the pre view, and then you were asked questions, and it turned out that people who had been exposed to resumes of attractive rivals of their own gender answered questions about religiosity more positively they claim to be more religious. So maybe that’s it. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe it’s like the guitar theory. I think, a million guitars a year must be sold on the idea that this is the way to get to get members of the opposite sex into bed with you. And maybe religion plays a similar role.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re discussing the philosophical legacy of Charles Darwin with Dan Dennett, author of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”

John Perry
In our fat final segment, we’ll look at the broader legacy, scientific, philosophical and cultural of Charles Darwin. Not just biologists and philosophers, but also many psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and even a growing number of economists see themselves as standing on the shoulder of Darwin. Does the spread of Darwinism just represent a late blooming intellectual fad? Or is it really helping us solve some of the deepest mysteries about the human mind and human culture?

Ken Taylor
What to Darwin hath wrought, for good or for ill—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Chris Smither
Both wrapped up in that double helix, it’s what we call Intelligent Design.

John Perry
Intelligent Design is one of many reactions to Darwinian evolution. What other theories have emerged in Charles Darwin’s wake? I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. And our guest is Dan Dennett, author of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”

John Perry
And this segment, we want to get into some some applications outside of strict biology of Darwin’s ideas. And we’ve got a email from Elizabeth in San Francisco that really raises one of the questions that we we hinted at, in our introduction, and that’s the issue of evolutionary psychology and the idea that you can get a biological or an evolutionary explanation of why men are inclined towards rape. She says that recent discoveries about archaeological discoveries about rd in her tribe suggests that this isn’t so it has to do with the fact that men’s canine teeth and female canine teeth are more similar to each other, as opposed to those found in other primates. In other words, she says men could have concluded back then that they would get much further with honey than with vinegar when it comes to women. This is important because people tend to rush to conclusions, and would falsely state that men are biologically destined to commit rape if you don’t include this important discovery. So I haven’t read all of her interesting comment. But but the point is that there seems to be this this issue in evolutionary psychology that’s getting a lot of attention and really focus attention so that you look at canine teeth. And that’s supposed to help help you figure out whether men are prone to rape. Is this a really emerging science? Or is this just so much stuff about nothing?

Daniel Dennett
I don’t know that particular argument before never heard it. It’s everybody, everybody, I think, realizes that it’s very hard to to get the right sorts of facts and the right sort of confidence in those facts, to say a whole lot about the conditions under which our species evolved several million years ago, but there are some, some pretty good signs I mean, as sexual dimorphism the difference in size and strength between males and females is a feature that is has very clear implications and parallels. If we look at if we look at different species, and we start with the basic imbalance, the fact that males This is as good as Just definitive of being a male males can make billions and billions of sperm and females can only make hundreds of eggs, and can only give birth to a mammal can omit can only give birth to, let’s say, a dozen offspring. Whereas males can, in principle have many, many more offspring than that. This fact is just as much a fact about us as it is about and many other species.

Ken Taylor
So Dan, are you suggesting so there’s a surplus sperm theory of the male propensity to rape, right? If it’s going to increase?

Daniel Dennett
No, that’s not the point. That’s the point of that is that if we look at many, many species, birds, mammals across the spectrum, we see that females are the choosy ones, they are the ones that have to be courted. They’re the ones that have to be repressed by the males. And, and that is true of our species, as, as it is, of say, birds and mammals generally. And so the term perhaps it was unfortunate was koi females or Koi. Males are not so cool. Because they don’t as it were, risk losing something by a sub optimal mating. They’ve got plenty of sperm.

Ken Taylor
So look, some. So male and female are differentially situated with respect to the reproductive challenge. Let’s put it that way. That’s right. And it makes it it makes it a good design feature that they have different kind of matrei strategies and all that. That seems right. Yeah. But one of the things that bothers people about this evolutionary psychology kind of line, one of the things that bothers them, I don’t know if it’s the only thing is that people somehow think that you slide and you mentioned the evolution of morality, people somehow think that you can, that evolution devotees slide from a description of what is the case? And what has been the case to what ought to be the case. Like somehow, if males are designed by evolution to to as an adaptation to have some sort of propensity to rape that suppose that’s true, then sign into the app, that tension and adaptation is about what’s in some sense good for the organism, then it must be a good thing that males are there, but we—

Daniel Dennett
That is such a canard.

Ken Taylor
Yes, but tell me why?

Daniel Dennett
Well, the people who who draw that conclusion are not the evolutionist said, the ones on the other side who are scared that this is the conclusion that’s being drawn. But although I think maybe if you went back 100 years, you would find second rate, even really objectionable evolutionists making that drawing that conclusion. Evolutionary psychologists go out of their way not to make that. So to draw that conclusion.

Ken Taylor
So tell me how to think so you mentioned something about the evolution of morality. So tell me how to think about more moral norms in regard to the evolutionary theories? And tell me how to think about that.

Daniel Dennett
Yeah, I’m glad you asked me that, Ken, because I’ve actually written a lot about I know, they’re careful not to go into lecture mode. Yeah. Evolution. Evolutionary explanations will not tell you what you ought to do. That is not you can’t derive an art from an IS, but they can certainly tell you a lot about the background conditions, and how we got to where we are. And they can also tell you something about what, what is possible. And then we can look at both what’s possible and what you might say what’s easy, and what’s difficult. And, and what the evolutionary models that have looked at morality show is that, indeed, we seem to have a leg up, we have some very nice instincts, if you like some built in dispositions, to make moral judgments of certain sorts, that does not show that those judgments are right, it shows that they are only that they are natural, that they are easy to get to from where we start. Now, the history of morality is in some regards a history of overcoming our basic human nature, and the reasons that we’ve want to overcome features in our basic human nature. That’s what we do in a basically in a political discussion.

Ken Taylor
Let’s slow down a little bit let’s go down a bit because our instincts Well, you know, I sort of moral instincts, let’s talk about let’s talk about that. And we might do there somehow constrained by evolution, but they’re all over the place. I mean, we’re the same people who, the same biology that led to the enslavement of millions from Africa and the exploitation of labor and, and the Holocaust. That’s the same biology that leads to democracy and, and, you know, a commitment to human rights, that the creatures that do the one thing are not biologically different from the creatures that do the other thing. So how is evolution gonna help us get any leg up on understanding the distribution of moral instincts and moral formations and all that I was gonna help us do that.

Daniel Dennett
Well, first of all, I think you’re exactly right is that there are there are instincts, which are really quite universal. And and they don’t seem to do the trick, because they are overridden by all sorts of considerations, but we should know what they are. And we should know that, in fact, indeed, the most evil people, the most thoughtless people, and the most concern people actually share, unless they are, in some sense pathological. And there are, of course, people that are they share a whole lot of moral instincts. And the important thing, in fact, for the ethicist is to recognize this and not make the mistake of treating those intuitions, which are really part of our sort of human nature, as specifically insights into truth, they may not be the fact that you have an instinct, or an intuition, which tells you it’s okay for me to refrain from acting here and let somebody die. That’s okay. But if I were to push that person into death, that would be terrible. Well, maybe so. But, but it may also be that this is the dictates of an intuition, which first of all, you have no idea where it comes from. It’s just a heartfelt intuition on your part. And we really should figure out whether this is grounded in good reasons, or whether it’s a sort of a sort of a reflex that you happen to have.

John Perry
Well Dan, it seems to me that culture is basically and this is not a negative comment, a big trick that humans play on nature. I mean, my illustrations would be condoms and aspirin, right? Condoms allow you to do something that nature gives you pleasure in doing because it wants you to procreate without procreating haha nature, and aspirins allow you to do things that are supposed to cause pain, like play soccer. Without having the pain ha ha nature isn’t your theory, morality, kind of just an extension of that, that we can pick and choose among the things nature gave us and so we can take that little read of sympathy that Hume talks about and decide that our a lot of our educational system should be based on giving that a great deal more importance than evolution would give it?

Daniel Dennett
Well, I don’t see why it would be giving it more importance than evolution would give it but I think I agree with you. I think that that human culture is in a very large measure, a set of, of techniques, tricks, as you say, it’s a term that I like to use do a bunch of good tricks that our species has learned over the over the eons and is passed down culturally not through the genes in order to improve optimize human nature, if you like, in many regards, and we’re continuing with that process. I think that’s a good way of looking at it.

Ken Taylor
On that agreement between you and John, Dan, I’m gonna thank you for joining us. It’s been a fascinating conversation.

Daniel Dennett
Delighted to join you.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Daniel Dennett. He’s professor of philosophy at Tufts University, where he’s also co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. And He’s author of many, many books, including “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. So John, how did your thoughts evolve throughout this?

John Perry
I love reading and talking to Dan Dennett, although I can’t always keep up with the reading, but he’s very prolific. But, you know, there’s a lot of philosophical talents. There’s being smart, there’s being acute, there’s being analytical, there’s being critical, but I think we underestimate enthusiasm, right? I mean, almost infectious enthusiasm and and that’s, that’s I think one of the things that makes Dennett really stand out.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, that’s one of the things that he and I have in common that sort of makes you recoil.

John Perry
It doesn’t come naturally

Ken Taylor
I’m not quite sure you’re a lover of gung ho yes, everything is dead weight and rebuild.

John Perry
You got you guys like Kant are impressed by the starry heavens above and I guess the moral law or the genetic law within and I’m just kind of put off by both of them.

Ken Taylor
This conversation continues as always on our blog, theblog.philosophytalk.org—we’ve already got a conversation going join it. And also check out our Facebook page.

John Perry
And you can download podcasts of our program as well. For the final word we turn to one of the most evolved of thinkers: Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was first published in 1859. With it just types immediately recognized as threat to faith. And only the books insistence that life itself is not fixed, but in the implication that of animals change and evolve over time. So do and so have humans. Darwin himself only mentioned human origins. Once in the book he wrote, much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. And that was it. Darwin formed his theory based on observations he made during his famous five year voyage on the Beagle. Darwin’s memoir that voyage became a best seller. Between the publication of that book and origin more than 20 years past what took so long. Well, Darwin was a sick man for most of his adult life. The nature of his illness has been a man matter of conjecture, ranging from tacos disease to lactose intolerance to plain old hypochondria. Most theories suggest there was a combination of physical and psychosomatic disorders. Its symptoms included flatulence, diarrhea, rashes, vomiting, dizziness, heart palpitations, and an intolerance for the weight of books. Whenever you read a book, supposedly he first had to rip it up in sections and make it light enough for him to read. Which leads to my personal hunch that it took him so long to write origin because it was too heavy for him. He knew its ripples would create a tsunami he didn’t want to deal with it. He had also been something of a slacker as a young man earning the displeasure of his father, so perhaps he wanted to prove himself to his old man, but was also fearful of disappointing him. He spent those years painstakingly gathering evidence working only four hours a day, he worked in secret, sending his notes only to a few close friends, he procrastinated. It wasn’t until a man named Alfred Russel Wallace published a paper on the introduction of species with us similar to Darwin’s own, but Darwin was finally forced to finish his book. According to anti Darwinist Andrew J. Bradbury, quote, illness provided a mighty shield behind which Darwin could hide rather than having to enter the public forum to argue for his ideas, unquote. When the book was finally published and was attacked, Darwin indeed did not defend it. But watch from the sidelines is this defenders among them th Huxley nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog went after attackers for him. Now seems the Darwin has a good husband though is devout wife Emma was dismayed by his theories and loving father, but was he a secret atheist, as many critics have surmised, Darwin is cagey about his own personal religious beliefs and an after dinner conversation he wants to ask guests why they call themselves atheists. If you’ve heard the word agnostic, a term coined by his friend th Huxley, I guess replied that agnostic was but atheist writ respectable. An atheist was only agnostic aggressive. Darwin responded, why should you be so aggressive? Perhaps Darwin was what we might call today passive aggressive. In his autobiography, I really do find these strong words, quote, we overlook the probability of the cost of inculcation, that belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and affecting the brains not yet fully developed, that would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God. As for a monkey to throw off it’s instinct of fear and hatred of a snake, unquote. After his death and eating it too, is what Emma and son Arthur had those words removed from the first edition of the autobiography, but there are finally restored and then 1858 edition, which may indicate that books like species change over time. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
The wisdom of the ages in a nutshell from Ian Shoales, the sixty-Second Philosophy.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Manilla Productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2009.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David Demarest.

John Perry
Our production coordinator is Devin Strolovitch. Our directors of research are Daniel Elstein and Ben Hersh. Lael Weis is our webmaster

Ken Taylor
Also thanks to Chris Hoff, Merle Kessler, Corey Goldman, and Mark Stone.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from the Templeton Foundation. Also from various groups at Stanford University, the Friends of Philosophy Talk, and the members of KALW San Francisco where our program originates.

Ken Taylor
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

John Perry
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.