It’s in the memes

The greatest of Bach’s 224 cantatas is BWV 109, ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben’. Its subject — the title translates as Mark 9:24, ‘I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief’ — is that strange cognitive dissonance of believing something yet not believing it at the same time. Daniel Dennett’s new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, is aimed at those who suffer from this intermittent unbelief, though not about God — Dennett is, after all, one of modern philosophy’s most prominent atheists — but about his specialist subject: evolution by natural selection.

Of course, most educated people nowadays accept Darwin’s great insight. But, Dennett argues in his typical avuncular style, they only do so up to a point: the point at which anyone applies it to the human mind. Even the most rational among us feel the pull of ‘Cartesian Gravity’, the force
that warps our scientific intuitions
whenever we get close to thinking about our own minds, drawing us towards dualism and other philosophically naive notions. Surely, so the faulty reasoning goes, there must be something special about our intellects that doesn’t admit of a purely Darwinian analysis?

Listen to Daniel Dennett in discussion with Sam Leith on the Spectator Books podcast:

Dennett treats this confusion with a dose of immersion therapy, applying Darwinism universally and far more liberally than most would dare. He goes so far as to encourage scientists to talk about design in evolution despite the lack of a designer, to think about reasons even though there is no reasoner (Dennett calls these ‘free-floating rationales’), and to consider ‘competence without comprehension’: like a computer, evolution can perform tasks competently, but without any need to understand what it has done.

This uncompromising adaptationism — treating no feature of life as immune to evolutionary logic — leads Dennett on to his Darwinian theory of human culture.