If I were to be stranded on an island with nothing but three books to keep me company there is no doubt that two of them would be Darwin\u2019s Dangerous Idea and Godel, Escher, Bach.\u00a0 When taken together, these two books provide almost the entire thrust behind this post-scientistic, neo-pragmatic mind-set in which I currently find myself.<\/p>\n
Darwin\u2019s Dangerous Idea is Daniel Dennett\u2019s strong defense of Neo-Darwinian thinking, but probably not in the way you are thinking.\u00a0 This book is not scientific nor does it argue \u201cfor\u201d evolution at all.\u00a0 Rather, it is a philosophical book which takes the truth of evolution for granted.\u00a0 As such, its primary target is not the religious young earther, but various intellectuals who look down their noses at such non-Darwinians with one eye while closing the other to the implications which Darwinism has for themselves.\u00a0 Less cryptically, Dennett argues that Darwin\u2019s theory is a universal acid which eats through any container, religious or not, which we might build in order to protect ourselves or our beliefs from it.\u00a0 By Dennett\u2019s lights, any realm of thought which thinks itself fully isolated from Darwinian thinking is simply fooling itself.<\/p>\n
Godel, Escher, Bach is, in a word, brilliant.\u00a0 One simply cannot help but stop at various points in Douglass Hofstadter\u2019s book and think aloud, \u201cThis man is a genius!\u201d\u00a0 While the primary objective of the book is defending a particular theory of mind, I think the clearest focal point around which the book pivots would be the concept of self-reference.\u00a0 According to Hofstadter, once you have any system which is rich and detailed enough to be isomorphic with itself in some way, you have what he calls
\na \u201cstrange loop\u201d of contradictions, infinite regresses and other such Godelian knots .\u00a0 In other words, once we start talking about \u201csets\u201d that in some way \u201ccontain\u201d themselves the idea of universality goes out the window.\u00a0 All such sets must either be inconsistent, incomplete or both.\u00a0 A few such systems which are explored in the book include but are not limited to Godel-numbering, Escherian artwork, a number of Bach\u2019s fugues, the Liar\u2019s paradox, self-consciousness in animals, self-replication in DNA, perfect, high-fidelity record players, and many more.<\/p>\n
Now, if we take these two books together we get the following question: Just how universal is that Darwinian acid?\u00a0 Is it truly universal such that it is able to dissolve itself or is it merely \u201calmost\u201d universal?\u00a0 Is Dennett\u2019s book actually inconsistent or is it just incomplete?\u00a0 I hope this question strikes the reader as more than just a sort of \u201cgotcha!\u201d jab at Dennett\u2019s book, because that is certainly not my intention.\u00a0 Indeed, I see this Godelian take on Darwinism as having very broad implications.<\/p>\n
As a brief example of this Darwinian antinomy in everyday life, let us consider the present day culture wars.\u00a0 The Liberal Left, in general, has a tendency to beat the Religious Right over the head with Darwinian science, arguing that intelligent, rational and well-designed systems can and are created without any Intelligent, Rational Designer at the controls.\u00a0 By these lights, anybody who cannot see this is simply too unintelligent or irrational to be in control of anything important.\u00a0 But this conclusion contradicts the very premise by which it was reached, since Darwin\u2019s theory just is the claim that there doesn\u2019t need to be anybody who is intelligent or rational at the controls for a system to work just fine.\u00a0 Thus, as a weapon in the culture wars Darwin\u2019s theory is either inconsistent or incomplete.