Darwin's dangerous idea

Blended learning: A dangerous idea?

Available online 20 December 2012

Review of Darwin ’ s Dangerous Idea by Daniel C . Dennett

No idea in science has been more threatening to humans’ conceptions about themselves than Darwin’s theory of evolution; it arguably has been the most controversial idea in the history of science. To most scientifically minded people today, the tenets of evolution—that species had a common ancestor, that they changed adaptively over time, and that the cause of such adaptive change was natural se...

Aesthetic evolution by mate choice: Darwin's really dangerous idea.

Darwin proposed an explicitly aesthetic theory of sexual selection in which he described mate preferences as a 'taste for the beautiful', an 'aesthetic capacity', etc. These statements were not merely colourful Victorian mannerisms, but explicit expressions of Darwin's hypothesis that mate preferences can evolve for arbitrarily attractive traits that do not provide any additional benefits to ma...

Ridley’s Dangerous Idea and the Evolution of Death

Dangerous Drugs