Books, Arts & Manners: Of Cranes and Skyhooks

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett (Simon & Schuster, 586 pp., $30)

IT IS the season, it seems, for Astonishing Hypotheses and Dangerous Ideas, notions claimed to be at once so simple and so powerful that they yield accessible solutions to the problems that have plagued human thought for many centuries. At last it can be told—or that is what the proponents declare to us.