Daniel C. Dennett (2017), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, New York: W. W. Norton & Company (first edition; hardback ISBN 978-0-393-24207-2; Library of Congress 2016046790; xviii, 476 pp., 2 unnumbered pages of plates, illustrated, some in colour; bibliography and index). A Norton paperback followed on 20 February 2018 (ISBN 978-0-393-35550-5).
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: the title, the subtitle, W. W. Norton and 2017. The exact first-appearance date, 7 February 2017, is from secondary catalogues, not from the publisher.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record, not a reading. What follows is what the book and its cataloguers say about it.
- The publisher’s description (Norton), verbatim in part: “How did we come to have minds? … Disciples of Darwin have explained how natural selection produced plants, but what about the human mind? In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett builds on recent discoveries from biology and computer science to show, step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. A crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Competition among memes produced thinking tools powerful enough that our minds don’t just perceive and react, they create and comprehend.”
- The catalogue’s summary: “a major new account of the origins of the conscious mind that explores the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture, demonstrating the role of culture in installing memes, including language, in the mind”. Subject heading: consciousness.
- Contents, from the catalogue’s contents note, in three parts:
- Turning our world upside down: Introduction; Before bacteria and Bach; On the origin of reasons; Two strange inversions of reasoning; The evolution of understanding.
- From evolution to intelligent design: What is information?; Darwinian spaces: an interlude; Brains made of brains; The role of words in cultural evolution; The meme’s-eye point of view; What’s wrong with memes? Objections and replies; The origins of language; The evolution of cultural evolution.
- Turning our minds inside out: Consciousness as an evolved user-illusion; The age of post-intelligent design.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for Daniel Dennett, as his book-length account of how comprehension evolved from processes that have none. No anthology topic holds it: its subject is the evolution of minds and culture. Its last chapter’s title promises a view on artificial intelligence, but nothing reachable shows an instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
Deferred because it was not read. This record files a book from its
publisher’s description and contents when no lawful text can be read, and
does not rebuild a book from what others say about it.
The claim the record wants is not yet in hand. The owner asked for the book as the source of “competence without comprehension”, to be set against Selfridge (LIT-427), Minsky and Levin (LIT-439). That phrase is in neither the description nor the contents. The description says something near it: a “comprehending mind” arose “from a mindless process”. The contents title “Two strange inversions of reasoning” may be where the claim is stated, but that is my guess from a title. A reading of the book, or of a paper of Dennett’s that states the claim on its own, is what would let the record place it.
What can be said now:
- Levin cites the book. Levin’s paper (LIT-439) cites it for the assumption that “there is no such thing as magical ‘true cognition’ that is the province of humans, without a smooth history of precursor capacities in simpler forms, stretching back to the base of the tree of life”. I checked that sentence in Levin’s full text. That is the gradualism the book’s description promises. It is also the premise on which Levin’s cells are “competent” agents in their own right.
- The bridge (THEORY-043). The contents entry “Brains made of brains” sits, by its title, on the decomposition side with Selfridge’s demons and Minsky’s agents (LIT-429): a competence the whole has, produced by parts that lack the comprehension the whole has. If the book’s claim is that competence can exist without comprehension at every level, it would back the downward direction of the bridge. On Levin’s reading it would back the upward one as well, since it grants the parts competence. Which the book supports, only a reading can say. The pairing is mine.
- Consciousness. “Consciousness as an evolved user-illusion” puts the book with Dennett’s consciousness papers, being filed in parallel, and against the views that make feelings the source of consciousness, such as Damasio’s evolutionary account of feelings (LIT-388). It also bears on whether any evidence can settle machine consciousness (THEORY-023), where an illusionist answer changes what the evidence would be evidence of. Both pairings are inferences from chapter titles.
Access when registered:
- Norton’s page for ISBN 9780393242072 (wwnorton.com): the description; its embedded edition data are now the paperback’s.
- The Internet Archive’s public MARC record for its catalogue copy (frombacteriatoba0000denn): LCCN, ISBN, extent, contents note and summary. The scan itself is lending-only (access-restricted), so I did not open it.
- Open Library’s edition records and Goodreads’ editions list: the on-sale date. The loc.gov JSON record for the LCCN did not return.
- Dennett’s curricula vitae in the Tufts Digital Library: the book’s entry and the lectures he gave on it, 2017–2018. The library holds no draft or chapter of the book under its title.
- Crossref: no DOI for the book.
- Not looked for here, and the natural next source: Dennett’s open-access paper “Darwin’s ‘strange inversion of reasoning’”, PNAS 106 (2009), 10061–10065 (DOI 10.1073/pnas.0904433106, checked on Crossref), whose title matches the book’s fourth chapter. It is not held in either record.