Life has been too good to me recently, filling me with more upbeat energy than usual. That type of good fortune can make it difficult to sit still and concentrate on my work, so yesterday I took my monkey-mind for a brisk walk to the Missouri Botanical Garden. I then meditated while sitting on a park bench in front of a huge tree. I didn’t know that this big tree would trigger vivid thoughts about my parents and my attraction to dangerous ideas.
My dad was an engineer who designed weapons of war for McDonnell-Douglas. Now deceased, he was proud of his ability to analyze problems and to come up with answers, even when he was considering life’s heaviest mysteries. He also embraced many of the pat answers offered by his religion and repeatedly tried to shame me into accepting them, which led to the extremely strained relationship I had with him.
My mom is very much alive and, at age 87, she still lives independently. She did not work outside of the home, was not hardened by the outside world, and was not comfortable challenging the arguments and lectures my dad launched from his seat at the family kitchen table. Far from those dinnertime arguments between her husband and her teenage son, however, she allowed her mind to freely explore ideas based on a rather unfettered sense of curiosity. My mom often asked me simple questions around the house, not realizing that simple questions would be the ones most likely to challenge my comforting inner narratives and presumptions. Simple questions can even be dangerous.
Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that truth is dangerous and that it took courage to determine what is true. Are you willing to question your most basic beliefs? For Nietzsche, real philosophizing was a demanding and dangerous endeavor that many people simply cannot endure.
From her perspective, my mom simply asked questions about things that seemed interesting, like “What is time?” Or “Is more always better?” Or “What if the beliefs of Buddhism are correct?” To this day, she looks puzzled whenever I thank her for being such a free-thinker (which she was, well before that term became popular). Regardless, her dangerous questions took root in me and they prepared me to appreciate many of the extraordinary aspects of life’s “ordinary” things. Her questions were probably a big reason why I majored in philosophy and psychology and, ultimately, created my website, Dangerous Intersection.
My dad was a smart man and an accomplished aerospace engineer, but it is now clear to me that my soft-spoken mom was the parent who had more intellectual courage. It was under her unwitting tutoring that my mind was made fertile to receive the ideas of the many innovative and courageous thinkers and scientists I would encounter in college and beyond. As a college student, I was stunned and delighted to see how much damage simple questions could do to the status quo. Disruptive questions and ideas are keys that could unlock otherwise impenetrable doors. Dangerous questions didn’t threaten me and I have always been convinced that it is better to know than not know. It’s better to ask questions than not ask questions. When the logical power of a new scientific idea knocks older treasured ideas off their pedestals, that’s always a good thing. That’s what is supposed to happen.
As I looked at that huge tree yesterday, I said, “Hello, Cousin!” I often say hello to my tree-cousins because I am a human animal and trees are literally (literally, literally) my cousins. They share a significant percentage of their DNA with human animals and, a very long time ago, we shared common ancestors. That is an extremely threatening thought to many people.
Charles Darwin was a humble, meticulous and brilliant man who knew that he had figured out a dangerous truth. It was so outrageously dangerous that he kept his research on natural selection under wraps for 20 years until provoked to publish it only after he received a letter by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently came to the same conclusions.
In his 1996 book, Daniel Dennett rightfully describes Darwin’s idea Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:
Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical Jaw. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea. (p. 21) . . . Darwin conclusively demonstrated that, contrary to ancient tradition, species are not eternal and immutable; they evolve. The origin of new species was shown to be the result of “descent with modification.” Less conclusively, Darwin introduced an idea of how this evolutionary process took place: via a mindless, mechanical-algorithmic-process he called “natural selection.” This idea, that all the fruits of evolution can be explained as the products of an algorithmic process, is Darwin’s dangerous idea. (p. 60).
Darwin’s dangerous idea is reductionism incarnate, promising to unite and explain just about everything in one magnificent vision. Its being the idea of an algorithmic process makes it all the more powerful, since the substrate neutrality it thereby possesses permits us to consider its application to just about anything. It is no respecter of material boundaries. It applies, as we have already begun to see, even to itself. (p. 82).
Dennett characterizes evolution by natural selection as “universal acid,” based on a thought experiment Dennett ran with his childhood friends. “Universal Acid” was purportedly a substance so powerful that it would transform everything it touched, leaving everything transformed in its wake.
Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea-Darwin’s idea-bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways. (p. 63).
As the main mechanism driving evolution, natural selection has lived up to the billing of universal acid. For example, Gerald Edelman sees natural selection at work in the mind as the mechanism for learning, a process he calls “neural Darwinism.” David Sloan Wilson has taken Darwin’s dangerous idea and applied it to many other aspects of the real world through his Evolution Institute.
How outrageous that human animals are not completely distinct from all of those plants and beasts out there! Darwin’s idea is so dangerous that it forces us to reconceptualize who we are and what our place is in the universe. Darwin’s Dangerous idea is so dangerous that it causes many religious people to run away while holding their ears. They are not willing to entertain that all of the many species that populate the world are (as Dennett says) “frozen accidents” (though not at all random, since every species is selected by whether it survives).
To me, hard-earned truth is usually far more amazing than even the most creative myth-making. Darwin’s Idea is no exception. The time-scale for extraordinary evolutionary change is massively disorienting, if only we stop for a moment to think about it. The speed of evolutionary change from shrew-like animal to modern human is one that I portrayed in a thought experiment involving driving down the highway while watching our ancestors go through rapid changes. Here’s an excerpt:
What if your mother stood right behind you, and your mother’s mother stood right behind her? Then your great grandma and then your great great grandma. Imagine them all lined up, one foot apart, stretching out into the distance. If a generation is deemed to be 25 years, a line of your ancestors as long as a football field (300 feet) would stretch backwards 7,500 years. The woman at the end of that 300-foot line would have lived during the time when agriculture just began in ancient Egypt. You’d still recognize each of your ancestors in that 300 foot line to be fully modern humans, biologically speaking. Isn’t it amazing to think that you could run along side that entire 300 foot line of your ancestors in only 15 seconds (I’m assuming you’re not an Olympic caliber sprinter) to end up standing next to one of your own ancestors who was alive 7,500 years ago?
Now think even further back. In An Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins calculated that 20,000,000 great-grandparents ago, our relatives were small shrew-like animals living at the end of the Cretaceous period. What if you spaced out your relatives one foot apart to extend all the way back to these shrew-like creatures? That line would be 3,787 miles long. That’s about the length of highway running from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to Anchorage Alaska. Imagine speeding alongside that line of your relatives at 60 mph, seeing the generations of your relatives whizzing by, more than 5,000 of them every minute . . .
I invite you to join me for the remainder of that thought experiment.
