There were two reasons. Second, I think that Dennett all too often misleads and manipulates his readers. Because it's easy to lose sight, in the thicket of his legalistic charges, of the real issues that separate us, let me touch on these two key points before I answer his charges. Natural selection is the one Big Idea that explains, if not everything, next to everything. And I think this is silly.
Natural selection explains a tremendous amount of biology.
And, undoubtedly, it will occasionally explain facts outside of biology. Indeed I find the notion that natural selection has much to tell us about, say, the origins and fate of political movements downright bizarre. But the voice of experience suggests that the world is not so tidy. And, as I'll argue below, the voice of science further suggests that Dennett's attempt to stamp everything from Planck's constant to Plato's Republic with Darwinism is flawed. But we needn't look to Dennett's book to find such tactics.