ABSTRACT
Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers, welcome or not to questions in cosmology and psychology. In psychology, Dennett uses the idea to explain all human thought, as Dawkins does, through competition among a mythical population of selfish memes, which are taken to be quasi-genes of culture. The neo-Darwinists have expressed their alarm at all this by ignoring the awkward parts of Darwin's writings and oversimplifying the rest under the name of Darwinism. Dennett explains how, as a boy, he was pleased with the idea of a universal acid, so corrosive that it can eat through anything. Fortunately he later found a theory natural selection that he thought could achieve this, a theory that: eats through every traditional concept. Though "biologists have to delimit the realm of possible creatures first and only then ask about natural selection".
