ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back to explore what philosphers often get wrong about the uniqueness of human beings. Like Pinker, Dennett turns to evolutionary theory in order to explain how we are shaped by biology, and why we are not very different from other animals. He also combines together computer science and evolutionary psychology to wrongly assert that we are fundamentally information-processing machines. By confusing DNA with digital code, Dennett asserts that we are computers pre-programmed through natural selection.
