Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life

No one has expressed the destructive power of Darwinian theory more effectively than Daniel Dennett. Others have recognized that the theory of evolution offers us a universal acid, but Dennett, bless his heart, coined the term. Many have appreciated that the mechanism of random variation and natural selection is a substrate-neutral algorithm that operates at every level of organization from the macromolecular to the mental, at every time scale from the geological epoch to the nanosecond. But it took Dennett to express the idea in a polysyllable or two. These two features of Darwinism undermine more wishful thinking about the way the world is than any other brace of notions since mechanism was vindicated in physics. The solvent algorithm deprives nature of purpose, on the global and the local scale. Both evolutionary phylogeny and organismic ontology can be explained as the operation of passive environmental filtration on variations produced by real (not just epistemic) randomness. Types and tokens are built by the iteration of this same process at multiple levels. Even when you get to the locus classicus of purposeful phenomena in human cognition and its consequences in action, natural selection explains both capacities and performance in a way that dispenses with purpose even here. Darwinism thus puts the capstone on a process which since Newton’s tim