Abstract
From Bacteria To Bach and Back is an ambitious book that attempts to integrate a theory about the evolution of the human mind with another theory about the evolution of human culture. It is advertised as a defense of memes, but conceptualizes memes more liberally than has been done before. It is also advertised as a defense of the proposal that natural selection operates on culture, but conceptualizes natural selection as a process in which nearly all interesting parameters are free to vary. This liberal conception of key concepts creates space for philosophical innovation, but occasionally makes the empirical content of the theory difficult to pin down. Nevertheless, the book is full of scientific insight, wit, and humor. It will undoubtedly become a cause of both controversy and inspiration for those interested in naturalistic theories of human culture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This is a doctored version of one of the classical formulations of Morgan’s Cannon. The original uses the phrase “animal activity” rather than “human activity” (Morgan 1903).
The need to preserve transmission fidelity is precisely why information theory played such a crucial role in the rise of communications technology. Part of the reason for the enormous influence of Shannon and Weaver’s original book is the fact that it contained a proof of the noisy channel coding theorem, which must have been an encouraging insight for the struggling communications engineer. Why? Because it shows that, for any degree of noise you may encounter, a code exists that will transmit your information without loss (Shannon and Weaver 1949).
A sporocarp is a seed-like structure that is part of the life cycle of fungi and some plants. In this case, it came from a species of fern.
Evolutionary processes can explain the origin of a given variant as well as its distribution within the larger population (Godfrey-Smith 2009). In this pair of examples, I am focusing on the question of origin, but a similar kind of novelty could be applied to distribution explanations.
References
Cao R (2012) A teleosemantic approach to information in the brain. Biol Philos 27(1):49–71
Claidière N, Scott-Phillips TC, Sperber D (2014) How darwinian is cultural evolution? Philos Trans R Soc B 369(1642):20130368
Floridi L (2017) Semantic conceptions of information. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University (spring 2017 edition)
Godfrey-Smith P (2000) Information, arbitrariness, and selection: Comments on Maynard Smith. Philos Sci 67(2):202–207
Godfrey-Smith P (2009) Darwinian populations and natural selection. OUP, Oxford
Godfrey-Smith P (2016) Philosophy of biology (Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy). Princeton University Press (reprint edition)
Henrich J (2015) The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Humphreys P (2009) The philosophical novelty of computer simulation methods. Synthese 169(3):615–626
Lewens T (2015) Cultural evolution: conceptual challenges. OUP, Oxford
Mercier H, Sperber D (2011) Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behav Brain Sci 34(02):57–74
Millikan RG (1984) Language, thought, and other biological categories: new foundations for realism. MIT Press, Cambridge
Morgan CL (1903) An introduction to comparative psychology. W. Scott limited, New York
Piccinini G, Scarantino A (2011) Information processing, computation, and cognition. J Biol Phys 37(1):1–38
Pinker S (1997) How the mind works, 1st edn. W. W. Norton & Co Inc., New York
Rathkopf C (2017) Neural information and the problem of objectivity. Biol Philos 32(3):321–336
Richerson PJ, Boyd R (2008) Not by genes alone: how culture transformed human evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Shannon CE, Weaver W (1949) The mathematical theory of information. University of Illinois Press, Champaign
Shea N (2012) Inherited representations are read in development. Br J Philos Sci 64(1):1–31
Sisask M, Värnik A (2012) Media roles in suicide prevention: a systematic review. Int J Environ Res Public Health 9(1):123–138
Sperber D (2000) Metarepresentations: a multidisciplinary perspective, vol 10. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Stegmann UE (2009) A consumer-based teleosemantics for animal signals. Philos Sci 76(5):864–875
Tinbergen N (1953) The Herring Gull’s world: a study of the social behaviour of birds. Frederick A. Praeger Inc., New York
Volodymyr K, Rostyslav K, Roman P, Nataliya P, Yaroslav T, Serhiy T (2013) Optimization of car coachwork using genetic algorithms. In: 2013 12th international conference on the experience of designing and application of CAD systems in microelectronics (CADSM). IEEE, pp 410–411
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Daniel Dennett and Tim Lewens for their insightful commentary on an earlier draft of this review.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rathkopf, C.A. Mental evolution: a review of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back . Biol Philos 32, 1355–1368 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9586-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9586-y