Dat Dangerous Darwin

[Dan Minette]

----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Brin-L Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2002 8:26 PM Subject: Re: Who are We? To me it was a bit more than philosophy book; I liked it in part because he discussed the individuals (Gould. Lewontin). Dennett is a philosopher but DDI was very different in tone from "Consciousness Explained". A lot of was about evolution per see with long discussions of adaptation etc. He obviously brought a philosopher's training to this book but I remember (I haven't read it in about 4 years) as a book about aspects of evolution Well, we definitely got different impressions from the book.  I think it may come from our different perspectives.  First, I don't recall any original scientific research by Dennett.  I guess my bias, as a research scientist, is that science writings present original work.  That doesn't exclude the possibility that he wrote a book about science.   He does go into long discussions about evolution, and I enjoyed them.  But, I always saw the philosophical points that he was trying to make that underlie the discussions about science. The feel was also different.  Mebbie its just because its evolution instead of physics, but then again the feel is more different from what I see as the feel of the discussions of my friends in biochemistry who have talked shop with me than that feel is from the feel of my own work.   I think the philosophy is the new work in this book.  He did a nice job of intertwining discussions of science with his philosophy, but I always felt that the his philosophy drove the book.  It didn't drive it to the point where he actually twisted the science, which made me consider it  a well written book, even though I disagree with his metaphysics and thought that he chickened out at the end.    Dan M.