Daniel Dennett Quotes (9 Quotes)

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.)

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.

Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea ... can be understood as a series of campaigns in the struggle to contain Darwin's idea within some acceptably 'safe' and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures, great and small, to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being just perhaps the chooser of the laws.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

Moreover, the eye contains a big flaw the retina is inside out. Why would an almighty designer do such a thing No intelligent designer, ... would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of the hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.