From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds"A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work." —Nature How did we come to have minds? For centuries, poets, philosophers, psychologists, and physicists have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled abilities. Disciples of Darwin have explained how natural selection produced plants, but what about the human mind? In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett builds on recent discoveries from biology and computer science to show, step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. A crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Competition among memes produced thinking tools powerful enough that our minds don’t just perceive and react, they create and comprehend. An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers and scientists, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain all those curious about how the mind works. |
From inside the book
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... Memes, unlike genes, don't have competing alleles at a locus Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture The would-be science of memetics is not predictive 12. 13. 14. Memes can't explain cultural features, while traditional.
Daniel C. Dennett. 12. 13. 14. Memes can't explain cultural features, while traditional social sciences can Cultural evolution is Lamarckian The Origins of Language The chicken-egg problem Winding paths to human language The Evolution of ...
... explain, and sometimes expunge, making the finished book a much more unified and effective reading experience than it would have been without their expert advice. John Brockman and Katinka Matson, as always, have been the perfect ...
... explain everything from the orbits of the planets and the nature of light to the tides, from volcanoes to magnets, why water forms into spherical drops, how fire is struck from flint, and much, much more. His theory was almost all dead ...
... explained, and we know that we belong to an evolved lineage that can be traced back to the dawn of life. If we can explain self-repair in bacteria and respiration in tadpoles and digestion in elephants, why shouldn't conscious thinking ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |