Darwin's Dangerous Idea Read Online Free PDF Page A

deceive yourself or let others do the dirty work, but there is no intellectually story about how it came to be that God created us and the rest of the universe, defensible way of rebuilding the mighty barriers to comprehension that without dwelling overmuch on just why God might want to have done that.
    Darwin smashed.
    The "how" question does not get separate billing on Aristotle's list, but it was The first step to appreciating this aspect of Darwin's contribution is to see a popular question and answer long before Aristotle undertook his analysis.
    how the world looked before he inverted it. By looking through the eyes of The answers to the biggest "how" questions are cosmogonies, stories about two of his countrymen, John Locke and David Hume, we can get a clear how the cosmos, the whole universe and all its denizens, came into existence.
    vision of an alternative world-view—still very much with us in many quar-The book of Genesis is
    ters—that Darwin rendered obsolete.

    26 TELL ME WHY
    Locke's "Proof of the Primacy of Mind 27
    3. LOCKE'S "PROOF" OF THE PRIMACY OF MIND
    Let us suppose any parcel of Matter eternal, great or small, we shall find it, in itself, able to produce nothing___ Matter then, by its own strength, John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it cannot produce in itself so much as Motion: the Motion it has, must also be ever since!
    from Eternity, or else be produced, and added to Matter by some other
    —BERTRAND RL'SSEU.2
    Being more powerful than Matter __ But let us suppose Motion eternal too: yet Matter, incogitative Matter and Motion, whatever changes it might John Locke, a contemporary of "the incomparable Mr. Newton," was one produce of Figure and Bulk, could never produce Thought: Knowledge of the founding fathers of British Empiricism, and, as befits an Empiricist, he will still be as far beyond the power of Motion and Matter to produce, as was not much given to deductive arguments of the rationalist sort, but one of Matter is beyond the power of nothing or nonentity to produce. And I his uncharacteristic forays into "proof deserves to be quoted in full, since it appeal to everyone's own thoughts, whether he cannot as easily conceive perfectly illustrates the blockade to imagination that was in place before the Matter produced by nothing, as Thought produced by pure Matter, when Darwinian Revolution. The argument may seem strange and stilted to before there was no such thing as Thought, or an intelligent Being exist-modern minds, but bear with it—consider it a sign of how far we have come ing. ...
    since then. Locke himself thought that he was just reminding people of something obvious! In this passage from his Essay Concerning Human It is interesting to note that Locke decides he may safely "appeal to Understanding (1690, IV, x, 10), Locke wanted to prove something that he everyone's own thoughts" to secure this "conclusion." He was sure that his thought all people knew in their hearts in any case: that "in the beginning"
    "common sense" was truly common sense. Don't we see how obvious it is there was Mind. He began by asking himself what, if anything, was eternal: that whereas matter and motion could produce changes of "Figure and Bulk,"
    they could never produce "Thought"? Wouldn't this rule out the prospect of If, then, there must be something eternal, let us see what sort of Being it robots—or at least robots that would claim to have genuine Thoughts among must be. And to that it is very obvious to Reason, that it must necessarily the motions in their material heads? Certainly in Locke's day—which was be a cogitative Being. For it is as impossible to conceive that ever bare also Descartes's day—the very idea of Artificial Intelligence was so close to incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that unthinkable that Locke could confidently expect unanimous endorsement of nothing should of itself produce Matter....
    this appeal to his