The manifest image that has been cobbled together by genetic evolutionary processes over billions of years, and by cultural evolutionary processes over thousands of years, is an extremely sophisticated system of helpful metaphorical renderings of the underlying reality uncovered in the scientific image. It is a user-illusion that we are so adept at using that we take it to be unvarnished reality, when in fact it has many coats of intervening interpretive varnish on it.

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.

There is a general generous tendency to credit innovators with more prior comprehension than they actually deserve, and this helps perpetuate the myth of the Godlike powers of our famous geniuses, and by extension, to all of us.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

We Homo sapiens are the only species (so far) with richly cumulative culture, and the key ingredient of culture that makes this possible is language.

Perhaps we are just apes with brains being manipulated by memes in much the way we are manipulated by the cold virus. Instead of looking only at the prerequisite competences our ancestors needed to have in order for language to get under way, perhaps we should also consider unusual vulnerabilities that might make our ancestors the ideal hosts for infectious but nonvirulent habits (memes) that allowed us to live and stay mobile long enough for them to replicate through our populations.

The claim that I defend is that human culture started out profoundly Darwinian, with uncomprehending competences yielding various valuable structures in roughly the way termites build their castles, and then gradually de-Darwinized, becoming ever more efficient in its ways of searching Design Space. In short, as human culture evolved, it fed on the fruits of its own evolution, increasing its design powers by utilizing information in ever more powerful ways.

The Absolute Ignorance of evolution by natural selection is indeed capable of creating not just daisies and fish but also human beings who in turn have the competence to build cities and theories and poems and airplanes, and computers, which in turn could in principle achieve Artificial Intelligence with even higher levels of creative skill than their human creators.