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Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

Authors:

Daniel Dennett (author) and Cary Wolinsky (covers)

Language:

English

Original language:

English

Publisher:

Penguin Books

Categories:

Biology and science

Publication year:

1996

Original publication year:

1995

ISBN:

978-0-140-16734-4

Has read?

No

Images:

High-res images:

[Back (18.6 MB)] [Spine (3.14 MB)] [Front (17.94 MB)]

Table of Contents:

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• Preface

Part I: Starting in the Middle

Chapter One: Tell Me Why

1. Is Nothing Sacred?
2. What, Where, When, Why—and How?
3. Locke's "Proof" of the Primacy of Mind
4. Hume's Close Encounter

Chapter Two: An Idea Is Born

1. What Is So Special About Species?
2. Natural Selection—an Awful Stretcher
3. Did Darwin Explain the Origin of Species?
4. Natural Selection as an Algorithmic Process
5. Processes as Algorithms

Chapter Three: Universal Acid

1. Early Reactions
2. Darwin's Assault on the Cosmic Pyramid
3. The Principle of the Accumulation of Design
4. The Tools for R and D: Skyhooks or Cranes?
5. Who's Afraid of Reductionism?

Chapter Four: The Tree of Life

1. How Should We Visualize the Tree of Life?
2. Color-coding a Species on the Tree
3. Retrospective Coronations: Mitochondrial Eve and Invisible Beginnings
4. Patterns, Oversimplification, and Explanation

Chapter Five: The Possible and the Actual

1. Grades of Possibility?
2. The Library of Mendel
3. The Complex Relation Between Genome and Organism
4. Possibility Naturalized

Chapter Six: Threads of Actuality in Design Space

1. Drifting and Lifting Through Design Space
2. Forced Moves in the Game of Design
3. The Unity of Design Space

Part II: Darwinian Thinking in Biology

Chapter Seven: Priming Darwin's Pump

1. Back Beyond Darwin's Frontier
2. Molecular Evolution
3. The Laws of the Game of Life
4. Eternal Recurrence—Life Without Foundations?

Chapter Eight: Biology Is Engineering

1. The Sciences of the Artificial
2. Darwin Is Dead—Long Live Darwin!
3. Function and Specification
4. Original Sin and the Birth of Meaning
5. The Computer That Learned to Play Checkers
6. Artificial Hermeneutics, or Reverse Engineering
7. Stuart Kauffman as Meta-Engineer

Chapter Nine: Searching for Quality

1. The Power of Adaptationist Thinking
2. The Leibnizian Paradigm
3. Playing with Constraints

Chapter Ten: Bully for Brontosaurus

1. The Boy Who Cried Wolf?
2. The Spandrel's Thumb
3. Punctuated Equilibrium: A Hopeful Monster
4. Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Burgess Shale Double-Play Mystery

Chapter Eleven: Controversies Contained

1. A Clutch of Harmless Heresies
2. Three Losers: Teilhard, Lamarck, and Directed Mutation
3. Cui Bono?

Part III: Mind, Meaning, Mathematics, and Morality

Chapter Twelve: The Cranes of Culture

1. The Monkey's Uncle Meets the meme
2. Invasion of the Body-Snatchers
3. Could There Be a Science of Memetics?
4. The Philosophical Importance of Memes

Chapter Thirteen: Losing Our Minds to Darwin

1. The Role of Language in Intelligence
2. Chomsky Contra Darwin: Four Episodes
3. Nice Tries

Chapter Fourteen: The Evolution of Meanings

1. The Quest for Real Meaning
2. Two Black Boxes
3. Blocking the Exits
4. Safe Passage to the Future

Chapter Fifteen: The Emperor's New Mind, and Other Fables

1. The Sword in the Stone
2. The Library of Toshiba
3. The Phantom Quantum-Gravity Computer Lessons from Lapland

Chapter Sixteen: On the Origin of Morality

1. E Pluribus Unum?
2. Friedrich Nietzsche's Just So Stories
3. Some Varieties of Greedy Ethical Reductionism
4. Sociobiology: Good and Bad, Good and Evil

Chapter Seventeen: Redesigning Morality

1. Can Ethics Be Naturalized?
2. Judging the Competition
3. The Moral First Aid Manual

Chapter Eighteen: The future of an Idea

1. In Praise of Biodiversity
2. Universal Acid: Handle with Care

• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

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