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. |
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... fact, they almost never work out that way, but evolution is a process that depends on amplifying things that almost never happen. For instance, mutation in DNA almost never occurs—not once in a billion copyings—but evolution depends on ...
... fact, many of us in the field objected to his title. There was nothing astonishing about this hypothesis; it had been our working assumption for decades! Its denial would be astonishing, like being told that gold was not composed of ...
... fact, since we tend to think we have already taken their measure. We underestimate them. We must look behind them, and beyond them, to see the way they tend to sculpt our thinking. Let's begin by looking back at Crick's “astonishing ...
... fact that all the candidates I just considered in my pantheon of great minds are men? What an awkward stumble out of ... facts without Before Bacteria and Bach Why Bach?
... facts, leaving the explanations and refutations for later. It is an obvious fact that although there have been many brilliant women of great attainment, none of them has achieved the iconic status of Aristotle, Bach, Copernicus, Dickens ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |