President Bush, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future."

Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.

by Robert Wright

Oct. 8, 2004

Oct. 10 update appended below

This week I published a piece in Beliefnet about an interview I did with the philosopher Daniel Dennett for my video website meaningoflife.tv. In the piece I asserted that Dennett (long famously atheist) had said that, as I paraphrased it, “life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.” In other words: the process of natural selection may itself have been set in motion by a designer (in some sense of that word), and the ensuing biological/cultural evolution may be moving toward some purpose that we don’t yet understand.

Dennett, in statements that have gotten wide circulation on the internet, has since complained that my piece misrepresents the views he expressed in that interview. So far as I can tell, he’s wrong.

Daniel Dennett took on the grandees of philosophy while still a student at Harvard and Oxford, then turned to pioneering and controversial work on artificial intelligence. With Richard Dawkins he has fought the 'Darwin Wars' and, when not sailing or farming, sculpting or playing jazz, is writing a new book opposing the rise of supernaturalism.

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Yes, declares the controversial philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. "Human freedom," he writes in his important new book Freedom Evolves (Viking), "is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us."

One might think that Dennett’s ringing endorsement of the reality of human freedom would make him popular with other intellectuals. It doesn’t. On the right, the conservative Weekly Standard denounces him as "a vigorous evangelist for evolutionary psychology." The neoconservative journal The Public Interest has called him "an evolutionary fundamentalist." That view was shared by the late left-wing evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who disparaged Dennett as a "Darwinian fundamentalist." Gould’s scientific collaborator Niles Eldredge concurs, dismissing him as an "ultra-Darwinian." The liberal American Prospect accuses him of "cybernetic totalism."

But Dennett has his admirers too. The New York Times Book Review selected his Consciousness Explained as one of the 10 best books of 1991. The Wall Street Journal raved about 1995’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, and declared that Dennett "does one of the things philosophers are supposed to be good at: clearing up conceptual muddles in the sciences." Zoologist Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue, hails him as the "ebullient, pugnacious and ever pithy sage of Boston."

Born in 1942, Daniel Dennett studied philosophy at Harvard University and Oxford University. His philosophical views can be traced most clearly to the influence of his Oxford teacher, philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle famously attacked Cartesian mind-body dualism, dismissing it as the doctrine of "the ghost in the machine." Dennett is now the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Dennett has spent his intellectual career trying to extend the Enlightenment project of putting philosophy and morality on a scientific and naturalistic basis. In a sense, Dennett is updating David Hume in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In doing so, he provides us with fascinating new ways to think about the meaning
of choice, the value of morality, and how the evolution of the human brain and its capabilities has made us more free.

Indeed, Dennett argues that human freedom is dramatically expanding. Language and culture, especially when abetted by modern science and technology, enable us to increase the range of our choices. As our understanding of our genes and brains increases, he believes we will increase our freedom rather than limit it. We will be able to prevent and cure more diseases, improve our social institutions, and even enhance human capabilities. He says that we defend freedom, especially political freedom, because among other things it enables people to make better and better choices over time. As important, Dennett maintains that to whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes and biological evolution, we no longer are. Instead our genes are now at the mercy of our brains.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey interviewed Dennett in February.

The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny -- or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic -- and life after death.

Freedom Evolves
By Daniel Dennett
Copyright 2003

The Mind's I
Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett
Copyright 1981
ISBN 0553345842