From Darwin to Derrida

Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life

By: David Haig, Daniel C. Dennett - foreword

Narrated by: Peter Noble

Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

How the meaningless process of natural selection produces purposeful beings who find meaning in the world.

In From Darwin to Derrida, evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection, a process without purpose, gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. The key to this, Haig proposes, is the origin of mutable “texts”―genes―that preserve a record of what has worked in the world. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.

Haig draws on a wide range of sources―from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to the work of Jacques Derrida to the latest findings on gene transmission, duplication, and expression―to make his argument. Genes and their effects, he explains, are like eggs and chickens. Eggs exist for the sake of becoming chickens and chickens for the sake of laying eggs. A gene's effects have a causal role in determining which genes are copied. A gene (considered as a lineage of material copies) persists if its lineage has been consistently associated with survival and reproduction. Organisms can be understood as interpreters that link information from the environment to meaningful action in the environment. Meaning, Haig argues, is the output of a process of interpretation; there is a continuum from the very simplest forms of interpretation, instantiated in single RNA molecules near the origins of life, to the most sophisticated. Life is interpretation―the use of information in choice.

©2020 David Haig (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"A challenging though rewarding exploration of the meaning and purpose of life." (Kirkus Reviews)

Haig's book could be a game-changer in the fraught relation between the biological sciences and philosophy. Its intriguing moral may be his dauntingly scientific first thirteen chapters legitimize and actually call for the kind of philosophical thinking that his last chapters unabashedly exemplify.” (Richard Schacht, Jubilee Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus), University of Illinois)

“David Haig's powerful mind and trenchant wit are fully matched by his caring heart and his gracious style. I shall be recommending this book to my students, giving it to my friends, and sampling it repeatedly.” (Stephen C. Stearns, Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University; author of Evolutionary Medicine)

Highly recommended.

This book gets difficult but important things right. It's admirably succinct and lucid as a summation of a powerful synthesizing vision of biology that embraces mind and language, mechanism and function, behavior and meaning in all their dynamic complexity. Highly recommended. Four stars instead of five only because it's not the sort of book one loves; rather, it's a book to be admired, referred to, and passed on to anyone looking for a solid yet expansive and humane foundation for understanding the topics in the book's subtitle.

brilliant

One of the best books on Evolution I've read since The Selfish Gene and Origin of Species

Garbage

It's just circular ramblings around the same old forced Aristotelian controversies about "causation": the kind that you have to smile and nod to for the sake of your undergraduate professors. You will be worse off for reading it.

Click bait by title, don't fall for it.

Justt play with definitions. don't be lured by title. nothing new. no coherent theme. very much regretted getting it.