Darwin's Dangerous Idea  

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"From what can "ought" be derived? The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most compelling facts about human nature - in novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that out ethical principles don't clash irrationally with the way the world is."--Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) by Daniel Dennett

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by Daniel Dennett which looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design—purpose or what something is for—might not need a designer. Dennett makes this claim because he thinks that natural selection is a blind process which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. Darwin's discovery was that the generation of life worked algorithmically, that processes behind it work in such a way that given these processes the results that they tend toward must be so. Dennett thinks, for example, that by claiming that minds cannot be reduced to purely algorithmic processes, many of his eminent contemporaries are claiming that miracles can occur. These assertions have generated a great deal of debate and discussion in the general public. The book was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award in non-fiction and the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

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