Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Intentionality… is the “aboutness” that can relate one thing to another – a name to its bearer, an alarm call to the danger that triggered it, a word to its referent, a thought to its object. Only some things in the universe manifest intentionality. A book or a painting can be about a mountain, but a mountain itself is not about anything. A map or a sign or a dream or a song can be about Paris, but Paris is not about anything. Intentionality is widely regarded by philosophers as the mark of the mental. Where does intentionality come from? It comes from minds, of course. (p. 205)

That is what a mind is – not a miracle-machine, but a huge, semi-designed, self-redesigning amalgam of smaller machines, each with its own design history, each playing its own role in the “economy of the soul”. (p. 206)

Biology is not just like engineering, it is engineering. It is the study of functional mechanisms, their design, construction, and operation. From this vantage point, we can explain the gradual birth of function, and the concomitant birth of meaning or intentionality. Achievements that at first seem either literally miraculous (e.g., the creation of recipe-readers where none were before) or at least intrinsically Mind-dependent (learning to play winning checkers) can be broken down into the ever smaller achievements of ever smaller and stupider mechanisms. We have now begun to pay close attention to the design process itself, not just its products, and this new research direction is deepening Darwin’s dangerous idea, not overthrowing it. (p. 228)

sometimes people use “reductionism” to refer to the view that one should “reduce” all science, or all explanations, to some lowest-level – the molecular level or the atomic or subatomic level (but probably nobody has ever espoused this variety of reductionism, for it is manifestly silly). In any event, gene centrism is triumphantly non-reductionistic, in that sense of the term. What could be less reductionistic (in that sense of the term) than explaining the presence of, say, a particular amino-acid molecule in a particular location is a particular body by citing, not some other molecular-level facts, but, rather, the fact that the body in question was a female in a species that provides prolonged care for its young? The gene’s-eye point of view explains things in terms of the intricate interactions between long-range, large-scale ecological facts, long-term historical facts, and local, molecular-level facts. (p. 326)

People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture. (p. 338)

We have language, the primary medium of culture, and language has opened up new regions of Design Space that only we are privy to. In a few short millennia – a mere instant in biological time – we have already used our new exploration vehicles to transform not only our planet but the very process of design development that created us. (p. 338)

Anyone who worries about ”genetic determinism” should be reminded that virtually all the differences discernible between the people of, say, Plato’s day and the people living today – their physical talents, proclivities, attitudes, prospects – must be due to cultural changes, since fewer than two hundred generations separate us from Plato. (p. 338)

Cultural evolution operates many orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution, and this is part of its role in making our species special, but it has also turned us into creatures with an entirely different outlook on life from that of any other species. In fact, it isn’t clear that the members of any other species have an outlook on life. But we do; we can choose celibacy for reasons; we can pass laws regulating what we ear; we can have elaborate systems for encouraging or punishing certain sorts of sexual behavior, and so forth. Our outlook on life is so compelling and obvious to us that we often fall into the trap of imposing it willy-nilly on other creatures – or on all of nature. (p. 339)

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is a considerable competition among memes for entry into as many minds as possible. (p. 349)

Infosphere (p. 349)

The structure of filters is complex and quick to respond to new challenges, but of course it doesn’t always “work.” The competition among memes to break through the filters leads to an “arms race” of play and counterplay, with ever more elaborate “advertising” raised against ever more layers of selective filters. (p. 351)

The most important point Dawkins makes, then, is that there is no necessary connection between a meme’s replicative power, its fitness from its point of view, and its contribution to our fitness (by whatever standard we judge that). This is an unsettling observation, but the situation is not totally desperate. Although some means definitely manipulate us into collaborating on their replication in spite of our judging them useless or ugly or even dangerous to our health and welfare, many – most, if we are lucky – of the memes that replicate themselves do so not just with our blessings but because of our esteem for them. (p. 363)

I think there can be little controversy that the following memes are, all things considered, good from our perspective, and not just from their own perspective as selfish self-replicators: such very general memes as cooperation, music, writing, calendars, education, environmental awareness, arms reduction; and such particular memes as Prisoner’s Dilemma, The Marriage of Figaro, Moby-Dick, returnable bottles, the SALT agreements. (p. 363)

Other memes are more controversial; we can see why they spread, and why, all things considered, we should tolerate them, in spite of the problems they cause for us: colorization of classic films, advertising on television, the ideal of political correctness. Still others are pernicious, but extremely hard to eradicate: anti-Semitism, hijacking airliners, spray-can graffiti, computer viruses. (p. 363)

What requires special explanation in the normal view are the cases in which despite the truth or beauty of an idea it is not accepted, or despite its ugliness or falsehood it is. (p. 364)

The prospects for meme theory become interesting only when we look at the exceptions, the circumstances under which there is a pulling apart of the two perspectives. Only if meme theory permits us better to understand the deviations from the normal scheme will it have any warrant for being accepted. (p. 364)

And never forget the crucial point: the facts about whatever we hold dear – our highest values – are themselves very much a product of the memes that have spread most successfully. (p. 365)

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. (p. 365)

What memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages – with some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure, no doubt. Normal human brains are not all alike; they vary considerably in size, shape, and the myriad details of connection on which their prowess depends. But the most striking differences inhuman prowess depend on microstructural differences (still unscrutable to neuroscience) induced by the various memes that have entered them and taken up residence. The memes enhance each other’s opportunities: the meme for education, for instance, is a meme that reinforces the very process of meme implantation. (p. 365)

The “independent” mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. (p. 365)

Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes – thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes. (p. 365)

When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we today – every one of us – can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents’ generation! (p. 377)

What happens to a human or hominid brain when it becomes equipped with words? In particular, what is the shape of this environment when words first enter it? It is definitely not an even playing field or a tabula rasa. Our newfound words must anchor themselves on the hills and valleys of a landscape of considerable complexity. (p. 379)

So the words (and hence memes) that take up residence in a brain, like so many earlier design novelties we have considered, enhance and shape pre-existing structures, rather than generating entirely new architectures. Though these newly redesigned function are not made from whole cloth, they do create an explosive capacity to look ahead. (p. 379)

We are struck, by our actuality and finitude, in a negligible corner of the total space of possibilities, but what a fine actuality is still accessible to us, thanks to the R-and-D work of all our predecessors! We might as well make the most of what we have, thereby leaving rather more for our descendants to work with. (pp. 450-451)

We, unlike the cells that compose us, are not on ballistic trajectories; we are guided missiles, capable of altering course at any point, abandoning goals, switching allegiances, forming cabals and then betraying them, and so forth. For us, it is always decision time, and because we live in a world of memes, no consideration is alien to us, or a forgone conclusion. For this reason, we are constantly faced with social opportunities and dilemmas of the sort for which game theory provides the playing field and the rules of engagement but not the solutions. (p. 460)

Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eunemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of the Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today – but there are a few – would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics. We should reserve that term of cricitism for the greedy and peremptory policies, the extremist policies. (p. 465)

Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments, which invited all comers to submit strategies – algorithms – for competing against all comers in a reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament. The winning strategy became justly famous: Tit for Tat, which simply copier the “opponent’s” previous move, cooperating in reward for past cooperation, and defecting in retaliation against any defections. (p. 479)

Kitcher (1993) examines a world of noncompulsory Prisoner’s Dilemma games (if you don’t fancy a particular opponent, you can decline to play). Kitcher shows, in a careful mathematical detail, how “discriminating altruists” (who keep a tally on who has defected in the past) can flourish under certain – not all – conditions, and also begins to sort out the conditions under which varying policies of forgiveness and forgetfulness can hold their own against the ever-present prospect of a resurgence of antisocial types. (p. 480)

Among the precious artifacts worth preserving are whole cultures themselves. There are still several thousand distinct languages spoken daily on our planet, but the number is dropping fast. When a language goes extinct, this is the same kind of loss as the extinction of a species, and when the culture that was carried by that language dies, this is an even greater loss. But here, once again, we face incommensurabilities and no easy answers. (p. 514)

The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain on their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for. Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on those who blaspheme against a religion (complete with bounties or rewards for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other incitement to cold-blooded murder. (pp. 516-517)

To watch, to have to participate in, the contraction or evaporation of beloved features of one’s heritage is a pain only our species can experience, and surely few pains could be more terrible. But we have no reasonable alternative, and those whose visions dictate that they cannot peacefully coexist with the rest of us we will have to quarantine as best we can, minimizing the pain and damage, trying always to leave open a path or two that may come to seem acceptable. (p. 519)

If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God’s rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods – that the Earth is flat, that “Man” is not a product of evolution by natural selection then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being – the well-being of all of us on the planet – depends on the education of our descendants. (p. 519)

What will happen, one may well wonder, if religion is preserved in cultural zoos, in libraries, in concerts and demonstrations? It is happening; the tourists flock to watch the Native American tribal dances, and for the onlookers it is folklore, a religious ceremony, certainly, to be treated with respect, but also an example of a meme complex on the verge of extinction, at least in its strong, ambulatory phase; it has become an invalid, barely kept alive by its custodians. (p. 520)

At every stage in the tumultuous controversies that have accompanied the evolution of Darwin’s dangerous idea, there has been a defiance born of fear: “You’ll never explain this!” And the challenge has been taken up: “Watch me!” And in spite of – indeed, partly because of – the huge emotional investments the opponents have made in winning their sides of the argument, the picture has become clearer and clearer. We now have a much better sense of what a Darwinian algorithm is than Darwin ever dreamt of. (p. 521)