People who fear that this idea destroys their cherished beliefs may have reason to find it dangerous, as it does invalidate the old traditional ways of viewing our world.
Dennett's purpose for writing the book, as he states in the introduction, is to actually show why Darwin's idea is not really all that dangerous once you really understand it. Dennett calls this algorithmic evolutionary worldview a universal acid, it penetrates everything we see around us, spilling over into every area without being able to be contained. For most people this inversion of what seems like the intuitive natural order of things is both hard to fathom and shocking in its implications. After Darwin, this rigid ladder is replaced with a bottom-up tree that doesn't start with any mind designing things teleologically at all, but with blind and dumb algorithms ratcheting up complexity teleonomically. Before Darwin, the view was that of a top-down ladder, starting from God who designs the world purposefully, and continuing down to humans with minds, animals without minds, inert matter, chaos, and the void. The reason why this idea is labeled dangerous is because it completely flips around the previous philosophical and religious understanding of how nature is created. This refinement of Darwinian thinking does not replace Darwin's original discovery, it enhances it.
Adaptation occurs not only from this selection process, but, as complexity science has discovered, from constraints on the self-organization processes that determine morphogenesis and evolutionary stable strategies. Dennett frames evolution as an algorithm that blindly selects genotypes based on the phenotypical performance of organisms within fitness landscapes. Darwin's Dangerous Idea could, in fact, be changed to Turing's Dangerous Idea, as this book is as much about computation and the algorithmic view of the world as it is about evolution.
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