Darwin

“If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else.”

(Dennett 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea p. 21)

however

“Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.”

(Dawkins 1976, The Selfish Gene, p. 1)

Universal Acid

“Darwin’s idea 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.”

(Dennett 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea p. 63)

Erklären or verstehen?

“Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.”

(Dawkins 1976, The Selfish Gene, p. xvi)

Bottom-up instead of Top-down

“All the achievements of human culture—language, art, religion, ethics, science itself—are themselves artifacts ( of artifacts of artifacts ...) of the same fundamental process that developed the bacteria, the mammals, and Homo sapiens. There is no Special Creation of language, and neither art nor religion has a literally divine inspiration.”

(Dennett 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.

144)

No progression

“In the world shown us by Darwin, there is nothing that can be called progress.”

(Gray 2002, Straw Dogs, p. 4)

Indifference

“Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”

(Dawkins 1995, River out of Eden, p. 96)

but

It’s not easy being a Darwinist

Perfectibility in Darwin

“The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for that vague yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many palæontologists, that organization on the whole has progressed.”

(Darwin 1859, On the Origin of Species, p. 216)

Scientific progress in Gray

“The reality of scientific progress cannot be seriously disputed – it is demonstrated by the fact of increasing human power.”

(Gray 2004, Heresies, p. 75)

Humanism in Dawkins

“We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of our selfish replicators.”

(Dawkins 1976, The Selfish Gene, p. 201)

Darwinism is a nihilism

Thank you