An Idle Speculation

First: an increasingly acceptable and mainstream evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior.

Second: an also increasingly prevalent, and possibly extreme, embrasure of occult and mystical explanations in rejection of reason and science.

Prediction of the first: a sterilization of the fruitfulness of evolutionary explanation, as it continues to exclude the possiblity that evolutionary explantions themselves demand a "missing element," an arrow, a telos that transcends the limits of naturalistic explanation.

Prediction of the second: a rejection in the mainstream of the overly-emotional, overly-irrational occulto-mystical trends towards "approaching" spiritual matters.

The hopeful synthesis: an increase, in a segment of the population, of an openness to a "scientific approach" to the spiritual; the acknowledgment that science needs the religious attitude, as much as the religious attitude needs science.

Question to self: is Dennett's new direction an indication of the first observation, or the hopeful synthesis? Dennett strikes me as the uber-intellectualist; on the other hand, he has a track record as a maverick. But I don't have time to read his stuff....