After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures, great and small, to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being just perhaps the chooser of the laws.
– Daniel Dennett
Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
– Daniel Dennett
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.
– Daniel Dennett
In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
– Daniel Dennett
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!
– Daniel Dennett
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.
– Daniel Dennett
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.'
– Daniel Dennett
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
– Daniel Dennett
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.