Monday 15 October 2018

daniel dennett

I have just finished Daniel Dennett (2017) From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (476 pp). Fascinating stuff. He operates at several cutting edges.

He has a sense of humour. My research topic for my Zoology degree was to do with the nervous system in adult sea squirts. He makes mention of them: “The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.”

“We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.”
― Daniel C. Dennett

BUT

“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.”
― Daniel Dennett

Back in the 1970s I reckoned that I had “a sermon that never would bear preaching”. Evolution. I taught it in school. But there was little reward from trying to tell the story to the hypocrits with sabbath hats.

It might be the case that, these days, a greater percentage of the population may be more receptive to the scientific way of  looking at things.