Daniel Dennett on the evolution of the human brain

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Daniel Dennett has never been one to swallow accepted wisdom undigested. As a student he happily sought to undermine the work of his supervisor, Willard Quine. Only one of the most respected figures in 20th century philosophy, a thinker eminent enough to appear on US postage stamps. Later in Oxford, he became frustrated by his fellow philosophers' utter lack of interest in how our brains worked and was delighted when a medical friend introduced him to neurons. And so began an intellectual quest to understand the human mind that spans five decades. He has always believed that our minds are machines. And anyone who disagrees lacks imagination, he says. Reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins introduced him to the power of Darwin's theory of evolution. And he has, perhaps, taken Darwinism further than anyone, seeking to explain how we evolved from uncomprehending bacteria to highly intelligent human beings. We know humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor. And that we share 99 % of our DNA with our closest animal relatives. So why would poetry, ethics, science and literature be somehow cut-off or insulated from our underlying biology? "You've given this much ground. Think about giving a little bit more". Producer: Anna Buckley.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is to the BBC.
0:04.0	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.
0:07.0	First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
0:10.0	I'm Jim Alkulele and my mission is to interview the most fascinating and important scientists alive today
0:17.0	and to find out what makes them tick.
0:20.0	Daniel Denet is a rare species, a philosopher with an active interest in science.
0:25.2	His first paper was published in a scientific journal, and it was the first of many.
0:29.8	I would say he thinks like a philosopher, but that hasn't stopped him from making a serious
0:34.4	contribution to science. Perhaps it's helped. For a long time after all science was natural
0:40.1	philosophy. The Darwinian revolution Denet, was a philosophical as well as a scientific
0:45.5	revolution.
0:46.5	Neither one could have happened without the other, he says.
0:49.8	He became sucked into science through debates about artificial intelligence in the 1960s.
0:54.3	He went on to write many hugely popular books including consciousness explained and Darwin's
0:58.8	dangerous idea.
1:00.5	He has he says spent the last 50 years of his life trying to understand how the human mind with all its remarkable talents has evolved
1:08.2	In the next half hour down in it. I hope to track the evolution of your mind. Welcome to the life scientific.
1:14.3	Delighted to be here. Is it true that had you been born into a different family you
1:19.3	might have become an engineer? I think so my father was a historian and my mother was an English teacher. So we were a
1:25.6	humanities family and thinking of becoming an engineer was about as remote as
1:31.1	you know becoming a railroad engineer you know they had me. remote as
1:33.0	you know, you know, they had me pegged to become a humanities professor or something like that.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -2919 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.