Product Description

"The best general account of evolution I have read in recent years."—E. O. Wilson. With a new introduction.

Twenty years after its original publication, The Blind Watchmaker, framed with a new introduction by the author, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte. Natural selection—the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process Darwin discovered—is the blind watchmaker in nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3042 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-19
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.com
Richard Dawkins is not a shy man. Edward Larson's research shows that most scientists today are not formally religious, but Dawkins is an in-your-face atheist in the witty British style:

I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence.

The title of this 1986 work, Dawkins's second book, refers to the Rev. William Paley's 1802 work, Natural Theology, which argued that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Not so, says Dawkins: "All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way... it is the blind watchmaker."

Dawkins is a hard-core scientist: he doesn't just tell you what is so, he shows you how to find out for yourself. For this book, he wrote Biomorph, one of the first artificial life programs. You can check Dawkins's results on your own Mac or PC.

Lee Dembart, Los Angeles Times
Every page rings of truth. It is one of the best science books-one of the best any books-I have ever read.

Bill Bryson, in I'm a Stranger Here Myself, published by Broadway Books, 1999
According to Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, each one of the ten trillion cells in the human body contains more genetic information than the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica (and without sending a salesman to your door), yet it appears that 90 percent of all our genetic material doesn't do anything at all. It just sits there, like Uncle Fred and Aunt Mabel when they drop by on a Sunday.

Customer Reviews

A Good Introduction To and Defense of Evolution
This book is another fine effort by Richard Dawkins to explain how the complexity of life can be explained by evolution including natural selection. He uses his usual detailed, but laymen type of explanation to explore how various attributes of animals (and man) have come about.

The books closing chapters deal with some of the other theories that exist to try to explain the diversity of life. He does not take a highbrow approach. He explains the core beliefs and concepts of the theories and then using their own words, shows how they can not explain it as well as the theory of evolution can.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a good discussion of evolution. You will not find an atheist arguing here. You will find a scientist who knows his field and wants you to understand it as well.

The Argument For Design

It is not a stretch of the imagination to claim that scientific evidence
supports the idea of a design in Nature. The real argument is not over
the presence of design but over the source of the design. Is it the random, ignorant, process of mutation and natural selection esposed by
Dawkin`s or the work of an Intelligent Designer.After a full assessment
of Dawkin`s book, I opt for the latter.I find it remarkable how often
the creativity we find in nature is so similar to human design-albeit,
Nature`s are usually more exquisite , optimal, or efficient.

Even IF blind
.....A watchmaker is still a watchmaker, and is presumably still making a watch that works. But whenever we don't understand something in our world, we say that there is no God. We profess to be intelligent beings but we think we know all there is to know, particularly as it concerns God. Sorry, folks, we don't know everything. And when we don't, just say so, don't say there is no God when you really do not know one way or the other. Every time we wonder "why", we say oh God would not do it that way. We would do it this way. We constantly substitute our judgments and viewpoints re what we think God should do. We are not God. So Mr Dawkins is in a field in which he knows absolutely nothing (re the existence or non-existence of a Supreme Being. Neither Dawkins nor anyone else is ever in a position to definitively state that there is no God. But we say it anyway, in our ignorance. Oh well :)