Universal Darwinism and adaptationism: is natural selection an algorithmic process that explains the design of minds?

Daniel Dennett, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Natural selection is an algorithmic process — substrate-neutral, mindless, mechanical — characterized by variation, selection, and inheritance.¹ It is the universal acid that eats through traditional concepts of essence, design, foundation, and skyhook. Skyhooks — top-down causal explanations that escape gradual mechanical accumulation — are forbidden in any properly naturalistic explanation of design in nature. Cranes — bottom-up mechanical lifting devices in design space — are the only legitimate kind.²

The Gould/Lewontin anti-adaptationism is a useful corrective to naive panselectionism but does not threaten the core thesis: design in nature is to be explained without reliance on transcendent intelligence, foresight, or essence.³

Sources

1. But leaving that issue aside, let's turn to the main topic of Crowe's essay. First break (2) constituents. Natural selec- (a) Biological engineering; (b) Algorithmic; (c) Gradual, step-by-step; (d) substrate-neutral design process. These are, I think, distinct claims that do not have to stand and fall together, though defend against criticisms.

   With a Little Help from My Friends, p. 4

2. With just this roughed-out idea of Design Space in our heads, we can now see "at a glance" how to frame a series of questions that have haunted debate about evolution ever since Darwin's time: Are there any actual designs, natural or artificial, that are not ultimately derived from that single Tree of Life, either directly or indirectly?

   Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, pp. 202–203

3. And it must have occurred to many other onlookers that in principle this big crane could be used to enable or speed up the building of a still more spectacular crane.

   Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, pp. 203–204

Where the argument is made

• Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
• Freedom Evolves (2003) chs. 2–4
• From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017) Part I
• Brainchildren (1998) chs. 11 (Cognitive Wheels), 16 (Cognitive Science as Reverse Engineering)

How the argument was received

The fully developed position is in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995); Freedom Evolves (2003) and From Bacteria to Bach (2017) extend the framework to mind, free will, and cultural evolution. I have not retreated from universal Darwinism but I distinguish my view from strong genic selectionism, accept that Gould's spandrels and exaptations are real features of evolutionary explanation, and concede Crowe's point that some speciation events are maladaptive at the gene's-eye level without thinking this threatens the algorithmic-process core.