The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
by Richard Dawkins

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
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Book Summary Information

Author: Richard Dawkins
Edition: Paperback
Published: 1996-09-19
ISBN: 0393315703
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: W. W. Norton

Book Reviews of The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

Book Review: A Good Introduction To and Defense of Evolution
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

Summary of The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

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.


"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.

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