Quotes from Daniel Dennett

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace.

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.

Sometimes you don't just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity.

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!

In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.