Daniel Dennett (1942 – 2024), American philosopher, popular science writer, and one of the ‘four horsemen’ of the New Atheist movement, has died. Let us respect his remarkable talent and breadth of knowledge, and his courageous insights into human consciousness, but also maintain our disagreements with his advocacy of social Darwinism.

He wrote a number of important books on the topics of evolution, human consciousness and free will. He was also a leading critic of organised religion, particularly in the United States and its evangelical form. Dennett, author of Brainstorms (1978), Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), established a solid reputation as a scholar who could convey complex scientific ideas for the general public.

He was a philosopher of mind, and starting from a materialist platform, he wanted to explain the workings of the mind in material terms. Removing any reference to an immaterial soul or mysterious mind-force, he advocated a reductionist approach – the mind is what the brain does. Thoughts are the result of synapses – electrochemical activity in the brain.

However, there is a problem. In covering the problem of consciousness, he employed an ultra-Darwinian mechanistic approach. Dennett was an old-fashioned 19th century materialist.

Panglossian adaptationism

Everything, according to ultra-Darwinians, is the product of natural selection operating on the organism, its DNA being the ultimate arbiter of its destiny. Adaption is the supreme and only goal of each feature of an organism – noses evolved on which to rest spectacles. Why do we rest spectacles on our noses? Because noses were adapted for that purpose.

Circular reasoning, like that of the hamster stuck in the spinning wheel, makes us active to be sure. However, we are expending all that energy, we are getting nowhere.

The current use of a trait is one thing; the reason it evolved and provided adaptation for an organism is quite another. To use a modern analogy; the internet was created to decentralise computer communications and facilitate exchanges in the case of a nuclear attack; only later was it used for social media purposes.

Gould and his colleague, the late geneticist Richard Lewontin (1929 – 2021), made a famous criticism of just-so adaptationism stories. While accepting the power of natural selection and selective pressures on organisms as a factor in driving evolution, they cautioned against a Panglossian view of nature. What does that mean?

Pangloss was a character from the novella Candide, by Voltaire. Foolishly naive, Pangloss reasoned that everything is as it should be – why do we have legs? We wear breeches, so that is what they are for. Gould and Lewontin use this analogy to describe Dennett’s Panglossian adaptationism when exploring evolution.

The other major analogy Gould and Lewontin used was spandrels – the triangular spaces, usually found in pairs, between the top of the arch and the rectangular frame. These are byproducts of adaptation, serving no particular purpose. We could reverse engineer an adaptive explanation, but would that be the reason the mosaic spandrels formed?

Biologists were more careful to evaluate their findings of organismal adaptations found in nature. Spandrels are the result of architectural constraints, not some teleological purpose. They can later be adapted to satisfy some utility, to be sure. Indeed, Dennett’s adaptationism has replaced the traditional teleological argument that everything was created by god for specific purposes.

Dennett was a proponent of the selfish gene – an organism was simply the product of DNA’s unstoppable quest to replicate itself and reproduce. The phenotype was the inevitable product of the organism’s genotype – in short, biology is destiny.

Darwin, while a strong advocate for the role of natural selection in evolution, also recognised its limitations. He and his colleague, Alfred Russell Wallace, admitted that natural selection could not account for that most uniquely human feature, the one characteristic that sets Homo Sapiens apart from the animal kingdom – language. The latter was not a singular, explosive event, but rather had its origins in earlier nonverbal stages. Intentionality and intersubjectivity arose prior to the formation of a fully functional language.

Dennett and the late Stephen Jay Gould, the palaeontologist and popular science writer, had an ongoing feud regarding what Gould called Darwinian adaptationism. The ultra-Darwinians, of which Dennett was a proponent, ascribed monumental powers to natural selection. Human characteristics, an organism’s physiology, the Earth, the universe – all can be explained by recourse to natural selection.

Darwin himself, in his later writings, lamented that numerous people focused solely on natural selection as the exclusive mechanism of evolution.

New Atheism

No, I am not suggesting that Dennett’s books are worthless – far from it. He was an innovative, brilliant philosopher who adhered to a materialist position. This should not blind us to his limitations, and we must not be shy about expressing our differences with the rightward deterioration of the New Atheist movement.

Emerging from the twin dangers of 9/11, and the fundamentalist George W Bush presidency, Dennett became an outspoken critic of supernatural and religious perspectives, and strongly stood up for empiricism. Joining Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, the new atheism provided a rationalist counterpoint to the rising tide of superstition-driven ideology. Proof and experience through the senses were taken as the starting points of truth.

The reassertion of rational thinking and scientific proof as the ultimate source of knowledge, as opposed to divine revelation, New Atheism, and Dennett with it, provided an alternative platform for freethinkers. As the years went by, Dennett, succumbing to the pervasive and poisonous logic of the ‘war on terror’, went along with New Atheism’s deterioration into an adjunct of US imperial warmaking.

Convinced that Western civilisation, with its purported European scientific superiority, provided intellectual clothing for US imperial wars overseas. While Dennett denounced all religions, somehow it was Islam that got him worked up and exercised his energies the most.

Dennett was undoubtedly a talented, versatile and energetic philosopher with a powerful intellect. Always challenging and engaging, his books contributed to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Advocating an empirical outlook in an America sliding into religiously based fundamentalism took exceptional courage.

Tackling the big issues in philosophy and science, his example is inspirational. We may not always agree with the answers he provided, but he had the tenacity to explore terrain that most of us fear to tread.