Clueless Agents as No Mind's Marionettes

A passage from Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back:

 

The feats of clueless agents should not be underestimated. The termites' castle, the cuckoo chick's ovicide, and many other behavioral marvels are accomplished with only the sort of behavioral comprehension that amounts to practical know-how, unarticulated and unconsidered. When we human observers/explainers/predictors confront this well-designed excellence, we automatically set about figuring out the reasons why plants and animals do what they do, reverse engineering them with the aid of the intentional stance. And, as we have seen, when we do this it is common and natural to impute more understanding to an organism than it actually has, on the reasonable grounds that the behavior is manifestly clever, and whose cleverness is it, if not the organism's? Ironically, if we were creationists, we could comfortably attribute all the understanding to God and wouldn't feel so compelled to endow the organisms with it. They could all be God's marionettes. It was Darwin's discovery and exposure of the mindless process of natural selection, with its power to generate free-floating rationales, that freed our imaginations to continue reverse engineering all Nature's marvels without feeling an obligation to identify a mind that harbors the reasons we uncover.

 

("Consciousness as an evolved user-illusion", p. 339)