Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett Read Free Book Online Page B

involved the application of precise could not yield a stable, well-motivated answer because there was no back-mathematics to the material world, and this apparently requires 38 AN IDEA IS BORN
    Natural Selection — an Awful Stretcher 39

    ground theory of why one classification scheme would count as getting the in, so in the conclusion of his book he went so far as to beseech the support joints right—the way things really were. Today bookstores face the same sort of his younger readers: "Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable of ill-formed problem: how should the following categories be cross-will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only organized: best-sellers, science fiction, horror, garden, biography, novels, thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be collections, sports, illustrated books? If horror is a genus of fiction, then true removed" (Origin, p. 482).
    tales of horror present a problem. Must all novels be fiction? Then the Even today Darwin's overthrow of essentialism has not been completely bookseller cannot honor Truman Capote's own description of In Cold Blood assimilated. For instance, there is much discussion in philosophy these days (1965) as a nonfiction novel, but the book doesn't sit comfortably amid either about "natural kinds," an ancient term the philosopher W. V. O. Quine the biographies or the history books. In what section of the bookstore should (1969) quite cautiously resurrected for limited use in distinguishing good the book you are reading be shelved? Obviously there is no one Right Way to scientific categories from bad ones. But in the writings of other philosophers, categorize books—nominal essences are all we will ever find in this domain.
    "natural kind" is often sheep's clothing for the wolf of real essence. The But many naturalists were convinced on general principles that there were essentialist urge is still with us, and not always for bad reasons. Science does real essences to be found among the categories of their Natural System of aspire to carve nature at its joints, and it often seems that we need essences, living things. As Darwin put it, "They believe that it reveals the plan of the or something like essences, to do the job. On this one point, the two great Creator; but unless it be specified whether order in time or space, or what kingdoms of philosophical thought, the Platonic and the Aristotelian, agree.
    else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus But the Darwinian mutation, which at first seemed to be just a new way of added to our knowledge" (Origin, p. 413).
    thinking about kinds in biology, can spread to other phenomena and other Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
    disciplines, as we shall see. There are persistent problems both inside and The development of the science of geology and the discovery of fossils of outside biology that readily dissolve once we adopt the Darwinian manifestly extinct species gave the taxonomists further curiosities to con-perspective on what makes a thing the sort of thing it is, but the tradition-found them, but these curiosities were also the very pieces of the puzzle that bound resistance to this idea persists.
    enabled Darwin, working alongside hundreds of other scientists, to discover the key to its solution: species were not eternal and immutable; they had evolved over time. Unlike carbon atoms, which, for all one knew, had been around forever in exactly the form they now exhibited, species had births in 2. NATURAL SELECTION—AN AWFUL STRETCHER
    time, could change over time, and could give birth to new species in turn.
    This idea itself was not new; many versions of it had been seriously It is an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock's tail was thus formed; discussed, going back to the ancient Greeks. But there was a powerful but, believing it, I believe in the same principle somewhat