Phylomeny

I’ve been planning to go to the Cambridge Darwin Fest this summer to “lay hands on” Daniel Dennett (in order to tell my children in the future) whom I see as the most important thinker alive and whom I deeply love as if he were my grandfather (and Santa Claus). My desperate wish to meet him was expressing itself through my choice of dummy images in the sketches of the brochures I make for the symposiums in our university:

detail from a sketch for the symposium "Digital Encounters" which of course doesn't really include Dennett (and Hirst), done 5 months ago

Last week, an e-mail was forwarded to me from my university, saying that they needed someone to make posters for the Darwin year events organized by Sabancı University.

I first thought about forwarding it to a friend. Nothing except the word “Darwin” could persuade me to take another job in this busiest period of my life and after a few minutes of thinking, I sent an e-mail saying that I was willing to do it. That day, I came across a friend I hadn’t seen for a long time and he said to me that he had finished reading the Dennett books I had been recommending to him, and asked for more recommendations. He also said that he was reading Dennett in order to “become a person who has the right to live in my eyes”.

My cellphone rang in the evening:

— Hello, I guess you’re the one who is going to make the posters?

— Yeah, how many do you need? Is it just one poster?

— Well, there are going to be several talks. Maybe we can do one big poster including all, or one for each, I don’t know. But the first one is on April 10th, that’s the urgent one. Maybe you’ve heard of him, there’s this man, Daniel Dennett, who is –

That moment, the person on the phone entered the list of “people who made me happiest” in the second rank. The complete immersion of this news into my nervous system took one week, and I spent that week making the posters, canceling every other job and thinking “I’m doing this in vain, I just dreamed about that phone call, it’s not real”. Yet it was real, I was making posters for Dan Dennett: I had my career climax as a designer a little early.

Yes, Daniel C. Dennett is coming to give our presents and his talk “Darwin’s Strange Inversion of Reasoning” at 16.00, April 10th, at Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Emirgan, Istanbul. I’d like you to inform me if you are going to be there because we’re trying to figure out how many people are going to show up.

In this one, I was inspired by the digital nature of evolution (for a beautiful account, see River Out of Eden by R. Dawkins), the Weasel program from the Blind Watchmaker and the Library of Babel (and Mendel) which Dennett makes great use of in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

In this one I focused on what Dennett says about Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning:

The great inversion of Darwin, what McKenzie calls his strange inversion of reasoning, was when Darwin realized that you have a bottom-up theory of creativity, that all the wonderful design that we see in the biosphere could be the products, direct or indirect of a mindless, purposeless process, and this simply inverts an idea that I think is as old as our species, maybe older in a certain sense, and that is what you might call the top-down theory of creativity: it takes a big fancy thing to make a less fancy thing. Potters make pots. You never see a pot making a potter. You never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith. It is always big fancy, wise, wonderful things making lesser things. And so, here we are, we are pretty wonderful: we must be made by something more wonderful still and it’s got to be like us, it’s got to be the intelligent artificer. It’s very scarey for people to give that up, and to begin to think about how our importance doesn’t depend on the importance of something still more important. That is, not of that sort. I mean on the one hand I think that a good bumper-sticker recipe for happiness is find something more important than yourself to think about and worry about. There are many such things that we can find to replace the one big important thing which many people think they have, which is God. (from here)

The official link for the event is http://myweb.sabanciuniv.edu/darwin/