Biological Evolution, Cultural Evolution and the Evolution of Language. Review of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Abstract

Daniel Dennett is one of the giants of contemporary philosophy. His new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, does reiterates the old motifs, such as “strange inversion of reasoning” or “production without comprehension”. But it is first and foremost a new project, whose goal is to calibrate the theory of universal Darwinism to the very recent developments in science, technology and our lifestyles, the most important of which is the coming of Artificial Intelligence. What Dennett does in the new book offers us “thinking tools” (his own phrase) to understand this changing reality by means of basic Darwinian principles.