Daniel Dennett: It's Evolution Baby
Decoding the Gurus
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Why Do We Say Something This Way in English?
The biotic world is saturated with reasons from the molecular scale on up. There's a reason why a termite colony looks the way it does, right? And the termites don't know it. We do not have to comprehend these reasons for these to be the reasons that we're acting as we do. It was really brought home to me actually when I was just helping my wife, who likes to study English. She was asking me to explain, like, why would you say something this way with this particular expression, form of words, rather than that way in English? "I'd never thought about it before," he said.
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