Talk:Daniel Dennett

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But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=13 Comment left by 204.61.12.74

Thanks, I've made the change. You do know that you could have updated the page yourself, right? Ed Fitzgerald 02:34, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

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• The process of natural selection feeds on randomness, it feeds on accident and contingency, and it gradually improves the fit between whatever organisms there are and the environment in which they're being selected. But there's no predictability about what particular accidents are going to be exploited in this process.

• When we replace the traditional idea of God the creator with the idea of the process of natural selection doing the creating, the creation is as wonderful as it ever was. All that great design work had to be done. It just wasn't done by an individual, it was done by this huge process, distributed over billions of years.

• Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up, without any direction at all. And that's a very unsettling thought for many people.

• For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens – our species – that we're just animals, too, we're just mammals, that there is nothing morally special about us. I, in myself, don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is certainly the received view in many quarters.