· Chapter 1: Tell me Why ?
· Before Darwin, a “Mind-first view of the universe reigned unchallenged; and intelligent God was seen as the ultimate source of all design, th ultimate anwer to any chain of “Why?” questions. Even David Hume who deftly exposed the insoluble problems with this vision, and had glimpses of the Darwinian alternative, could not see how to take it seriously.
· Locke “Ex nihilo nihil fit”….. Don’t we see that whereas matter and motion could produce changes of “figure and bulk”, they could never produce “thought” ? ….. Certainly in Locke’s day, - which was also Descartes day – ht every idea of artificial intelligence was so close to unthinkable hat Locke could confidently expect unanimous endorsement of this appeal to his audience, and appeal that would risk hoots of derision today, p.26
· “So if we suppose nothing first, or eternal: Matter can never begin to be. I we suppose bare Matter, without motion, eternal: Motion can never begin to be: If we suppose only Matter and Motion first, or eternal: Thought can never begin to be. For it is impossible to conceive that Matter either with or without Motion could have originally in and from itself Sense, perception and Knowledge, as is evident from hence, that Sense, perception and Knowledge must be properly eternally inseparable from Matter and every particle of it.” (Locke). …. So, if Locke is right, Mind must come first – or at least tied for first…. This purports to be an entirely secular, logical – one might almost say mathematical – vindication of a central aspect of Judaeo-Christian (and also Islamic) cosmology: in the beginning was something with mind - “ cognitive being”, as Locke says. p 28
· Cicero: “When you see a sundial or a water clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artefacts and their artificers ? Cicero quoted in Gjertsen 1989 p.199 footnoted on p.29 in Dennett
· Hume: Hume knew he had shown that the Argument from Design was an irreparably flawed bridge between science and religion, and he arranged to have his Dialogues published after his death in 1776 precisely to save himself from persecution. p32
· Note that the argument from design depends on a inductive inference: where there’s smoke, there’s fire; where there’s design, there’s mind. p30
· (Hume as Philo) dreams up some speculations that come tantalisingly close to scooping Darwin….p32
· “The continual motion of matter, therefore, in less than infinite transpositions, must produce this economy or order; and by its very nature, that order, when once established, supports itself, for many ages, if not eternity. But whatever matter is so poised, arranged, and adjusted as to continue in perpetual, motion, and yet preserve a constancy in the forms, its situation must, of necessity, have all the same appearance of art and contrivance which we observe at present….A defect in any of these particulars destroys the form; and the matter, of which it is composed, is again set loose, and is thrown into irregular motions and fermentations, till it unite itself into some other regular form….may not this account for all the appearing wisdom and contrivance which is in the universe ?
(Hume as Philo) quoted on p.33
· (Hume) caved in because he just couldn’t imagine any other explanation of the origin of the manifest design in nature. p32
· Darwin neither invented the wonderful idea out of whole clot all by himself, nor understood it in its entirety even when he had formulated it.
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· Chapter 2: An idea is born
· Darwin, setting out to answer a relatively modest question about the origin of species, described a process he called natural selection, a mindless, purposeless, mechanical process. this turns out to be the seed of an answer to a much grander question: how does design come into existence ?
Darwin conclusively demonstrated hat contrary to ancient tradition, species are not eternal and immutable; they evolve. The origin of new species was shown to be the result of “descent with modification”. less conclusively, Darwin introduced an idea of how this evolutionary process took place: via mindless, mechanical – algorithmic – process he called “natural selection”.
This idea, that all fruits of evolution can be explained as the products of an algorithmic process, is Darwin’s dangerous idea.
· The term algorithm descends, via Latin (algorismus) to early English (algorisme and, mistakenly there from algorithm) from the name of a Persian mathematician, Muusa al-Khowarizm, whose book on arithmetical procedures, written about 835 AD was translated into Latin in the 12th C by Adelard of bath or Robert of Chester.
· The idea that an algorithm is a foolproof and somehow “mechanical” procedure has been present for centuries, but it was the pioneering work of Alan Turin, Kurt Godel and Alonzo Church in the 1930’s that more or less fixed our current understanding of the term.
· Three key features of algorithms will be important to us….
· substrate neutrality: The procedure for long division works equally well with pencil ad paper or parchment, neon lights or skywriting using any symbol system you like. The power of he procedure is due to its logical structure, not the causal powers of the materials used in the instantiation, just as long as those causal powers permit the prescribed steps to be followed exactly.
· underlying mindlessness: Although the overall design of the procedure may be brilliant, or yield brilliant results, each constituent step, as well as transition between steps, is utterly simple. How simple ? Simple enough for a dutiful idiot to perform – or a straightforward mechanical device to perform. the standard textbook analogy notes that algorithms are recipes of sorts, designed to be followed by novice cooks. A recipe book written for great chefs might include the phrase “Poach fish in a suitable wine until almost done,” but an algorithm for the same process might begin, “Choose a white wine that says “dry” on the label; take a corkscrew and open the bottle”…. a tedious breakdown of the process into dead simple steps, requiring no wise decision or delicate judgements or intuitions on the part of the recipe-reader.
· guaranteed results: Whatever it is that the algorithm does, it always does it, if it is executed without misstep. An algorithm is a foolproof recipe.
· We can now reformulate (Darwin’s) fundamental idea as follows:
Life on earth has been generated over billions of years in a single branching tree – the Tree of Life – by one algorithmic process or another.
· Chapter 3: Universal Acid
· Many people, Darwin included, could dimly see that this idea of natural selection had revolutionary potential, but just what did it promise to overthrow ? Darwin’s idea can be used to dismantle and then rebuild a traditional structure of western thought, which I call te Cosmic Pyramid.
This provides a new explanation of the origin, by gradual accumulation, of all the design in the universe. Ever since Darwin, scepticism has been aimed at his implicit claim that the various processes of natural selection, in spite of their underlying mindlessness, are powerful enough to have done all the design work that is manifest in the world.
· Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is that Design can emerge from mere Order via an algorithmic process that makes no use of pre-existing Mind. Skeptics have hoped to show that at least somewhere in this process, a helping hand (more accurately a helping Mind) must have been provided – a skyhook to do some of the lifting.
· In their attempts to prove a role for skyhooks, they have often discovered cranes: products of earlier algorithmic processes that can amplify the power of the basic Darwinian algorithm, making the process locally swifter and more efficient in a non-miraculous way. Good reductionists suppose that all design can be explained without skyhooks; greedy reductionists suppose that it can all be explained without cranes.
· Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything ! The problem is: what do you keep it in ?.... Little did I know that in a few years I would encounter an idea – Darwin’s idea – bearing an unmistakeable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways. p63
· John Locke’s argument has already drawn our attention to a particularly abstract version of the hierarchy, which I will call the Cosmic Pyramid
God
Mind
Design
Order
Chaos
Nothing
Not all matter is ordered, some is in chaos; Only some ordered matter is also designed; Only some designed things have minds; and, of course, only one Mind is God. God, the first mind, is the source and explanation of everything underneath. p64
· “In the Thirteenth century, Aquinas offered the view that natural bodies [such as planets, raindrops, volcanoes] act as if guided toward a definite goal or end “so as to obtain the best results”. This fitting of means to ends implies, argues Aquinas, an intention. But, seeing as natural bodies mack consciousness, they cannot supply that intention themselves. “Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are direct ed to their end; and tis being we call God” Davies 1992 p200 quoted in Dennett p. 65
· But Darwin suggests a division: Give me Order, he says and time, and I will give you Design….. Marx …. declared (this as a) death blow to teleology.)
· John Dewey nicely described the inversion some years later….”Interest shifts… from an intelligence that shaped things once for all, to the particular intelligences which things are even now shaping” Dewey, the Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, 1910, p15 quoted in Dennett p66.
· But the idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than a First Cause is too revolutionary for some – an “awful stretcher” that their own minds cannot accommodate comfortably. p66
· “Time’s arrow given by Entropy – the loss of organisation, or loss of temperature differences – is statistical and is subject to local small-scale reversals. Most striking: life is a systematic reversal of entropy, and intelligence creates structures and energy differences against the supposed gradual ‘death’ through entropy of the physical universe. Richard Gregory, 1981, Mind in Science, p136 p.69
· Skyhook, orig. Aeronaut. An imaginary contrivance for attachment to the sky; and imaginary means of suspension in the sky. [oxford English Dictionary.] p.74
· Let us understand that a sky-hook” is a mind first force or power or process, and exception to the principle hat all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. p76
· Cranes can do the lifting work our imaginary skyhooks might do, and they do it in an honest, non question-begging fashion. p75
· A crane … is a sub-process or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated o permit the local speeding up of he basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself he predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the basic process. p76
· Those who yearn for skyhooks, call those who eagerly settle for cranes “reductionists”, and they can often make reductionists seem philistine and heartless, if nor downright evil. p80.
· Greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes. Good reductionists believe hat everything can be explained without skyhooks. p.82
· (Good reductionism) is simply the commitment to non-question-egging science without any cheating by embracing mysteries or miracles at the outset. p82
· ..in their eagerness for a bargain, in their zeal to explain too much too fast, scientists and philosophers often underestimate their complexities, trying to skip whole layers or levels of theory in their rush to fasten everything securely and neatly to the foundation. p82
· Darwin’s dangerous idea is reductionism incarnate, promising to unite and explain just about everything in one magnificent vision. Its being the idea of an algorithmic process makes it all the more powerful, since the substrate neutrality it thereby possesses permits us to consider its application to just about anything. It is no respecter of material boundaries. It applies…even to itself. p82
· The most common fear about Darwin’ idea is that it will not just explain but explain away the Minds and Purposes and Meanings that we all hold dear. People fear that once this universal acid has passed through the monuments we cherish, they will cease to exist, dissolved in an unrecognisable and unlovable puddle of scientistic destruction. This cannot be a sound fear; a proper reductionistic explanation of these phenomena would leave the still standing but just demystified, unified, placed on more secure foundation. we might learn some surprising or even shocking things about these treasures, but unless our valuing these things was based all along on confusion o mistaken identity, how could increased understanding of them diminish their value in our eyes ? p82
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· Chapter 4: The Tree of Life
· How did the historical process of evolution actually make the Tree of Life ? In Order to understand the controversies about the power of natural selection to explain the origins of all design, we must firstlearn how to visualise the Tree of Life, getting clear about some easily misunderstood features of its shape, and a few of the key moments in its history.
· There are patterns in the unimaginably detailed Tree of life, highlighting crucial events that made the later flourishing of the Tree possible.
· The eukaryotic revolution and the multcellular revolution are the most important, followed by the speciation events, invisible at the time, but later seen to mark each such major divisions as those between plants and animals.
· If science is to explain the patterns discernable in all this complexity, it must rise above the microscopic view to other levels, taking on idealizations when necessary so we can see the woods for the trees p.103
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· The Earth is about 4.5 million years old… p86
· …the simplest single celled organisms – the prokaryotes – appeared at least 3.5 billion years ago….
· … about 1.4 billion years ago, a major revolution happened: some of the simplest life forms literally joined forces, when some bacteria-like prokaryotes invaded the membranes of other prokaryotes, creating the eukaryotes – cells with nuclei and other specialised internal bodies. p 86
· These internal bodies, called organelles or plastids, are the key design innovation opening up the regions of Design Space inhabited today.
· That second revolution – the emergence of the first multicelled organisms – had to wait 700 million years or so. p86
Chapter 5: The Possible and the actual
· The contrast between the actual and the possible is fundamental to all explanation in biology. It seems we need to distinguish different grades of possibility, and Darwin provides a framework for a unified treatment of biological possibility in terms of accessibility in “the Library of Mendel”, the space of all genomes. In order to consgtruct this useful idealisation, we must acknowledge and then set aside certain complications in the relations between a genome and a viable organism. p.103
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