ABSTRACT
Near the beginning of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett tells us that “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” (1995: 21). Of course, the idea Dennett had in mind was natural selection. But what, exactly, is that idea? Should we even think of it as a “single” idea? I suggest we should think of natural selection as a family of related modes of explanation, which have changed gradually over the years as the theories in which they are embedded have been reformulated in order to address different problems. In other words, our understanding of natural selection itself has been subject to a process of “descent with modification.”
