Dennett egregiously misrepresented

In this interview, Daniel Dennett seems to do something strange. It's certainly out of character, given what I know of Dennett's positions on evolution, design. According to Robert Wright:

I have some bad news for Dennett's many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.

Well, this is unusual. The link above leads to the video; the text comes from this article from Beliefnet. Having watched the video, and read the article, I see several problems with Wright's claim.

1. Equivocation on design and directionality. During the interview, Wright asks Dennett if the evolutionary process is, in some sense, directional. Dennett answers affirmatively. It's hard not to do so, if your criterion for directionality is sufficiently loose. It seems to me undeniable that, as a matter of fact, life on Earth has tended towards greater complexity. It also seems plausible that, given enough time, evolution will tend to produce more, rather than less, complexity. However, it does not follow from this that any given lineage will get more complex (in fact, it will likely die off). Likewise, it does not follow that any given finite stretch of time will see a general increase in the complexity of life. It might even be the case that evolution might have this tendency towards greater complexity, but that any life more complex than, say, an amoeba, is still wildly unlikely. Dennett makes similar points during the interview. Wright seems to accept them. However, here's what his article says:

If you're going to believe, as that Anglican clergyman suggested, that a divine being set natural selection in motion, confident that it would eventually produce some species as intelligent as humans, then you have to believe that natural selection was likely to produce such intelligence from the beginning—that it was in this sense "directional."

This isn't the same sort of directionality that I was talking about, and that Dennett was talking about. Even so, Dennett seems to grant Wright's next move, that directionality might imply design. This isn't particularly meaningful, though, as design has an informal minimal specification as well. We might say that wasps build their nests according to a design (or a plan, or a blueprint), but I don't think we consider wasps to actually have designs, plans or blueprints. We're simply saying that the item in question exhibits a certain level of complexity, and perhaps that if we wanted to duplicate their efforts, we would use a design, plan, or blueprint. Richard Dawkins has proposed that we call such objects "designoid" to avoid the confusion we see in this interview. Dennett would, I think, agree with my account. Wright sounds like he's talking this way at first, but then shifts to a more rigorous conception of design as requiring a designer.

2. There's a difference between saying something might be coherent and that something might be possible. At one or two points during the interview, Wright asks Dennett if he agrees that we might call directionality evidence for some higher purpose. Dennett says explicitly at one point that he thinks that this might be incoherent, but that it isn't superficially incoherent. This suggests he's offering concessions not because he thinks they are plausible but instead for the sake of argument. Similarly, this suggests that his final concession (that there might be some higher power guiding ) should but taken to mean that someone, somewhere might construct a coherent version of this hypothesis. If this is true, Wright egregiously misrepresents Dennett in saying that he "recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose."

3. More equivocation on goals and purposes. From the article:

Dennett has long accepted Dawkins's line of thought, and he has long accepted
one extension of it: that natural selection has imbued organisms with "goals,"
with "purpose."

This isn't particularly impressive. He is right puts "goals" and "purpose" in scare quotes, because when Dennett doesn't think that there are any such things in any significant way. That is, he doesn't think that there are conscious beings, who experience things that have some qualitative character, and who possess the intentionality that's required for genuine goals and purposes. At best, we've got as-if intentionality; we can adopt the intentional stance in describing people (just like we do with computers and wasps), but in the end, our intentionality is illusory. So, it's surprising that Wright says:

Dennett has long believed that William Paley was right to look at organisms and
surmise that (a) they had a designer (in some sense of the word); and (b) this
designer had imbued them with goals, with an overarching purpose...

Surprising, and entirely wrong, since Paley talks about design, goals, and purpose in entirely different ways. There's a lot more of this garbage. Wright talks about "higher purposes" and evolution as bearing "some of the hallmarks of the divine," but then claims that he's not bringing in any metaphysical baggage with this terminology.

I found this through Andrew Sullivan, who heads the story under the title "An Atheist Recants." This is simply beyond the pale; at no point does Dennett confess that Christ is his Lord and Savior; he never swears to uphold the Five Pillars of Islam. He doesn't get baptized, he doesn't start on the path to enlightenment, and he doesn't ever recant. Here's one way Wright describes it:

Dennett's climactic concession may not sound dramatic. He just agrees reluctantly with my assertion that "to the extent that evolution on this planet" has properties "comparable" to those of an organism's maturation—in particular "directional movement toward functionality"—then the possibility that natural selection is a product of design gets more plausible. But remember: He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties. Ergo: By Dennett's own analysis, there is at least some evidence that natural selection is a product of design.

Elsewhere, Wright casts Dennett as having scales fall from his eyes (see the quote I lead off with), but in at least one place, Wright's almost honest. He still misrepresents Dennett's position, but makes some attempt to explain how minimal Dennett's concession is. Sullivan goes way too far. I don't see how he can make the claim that Dennett has recanted. I'd urge him to retract this claim.