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 | Richard Dawkins | Makes evolution understandable

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The Blind Watchmak...

	The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design Richard Dawkins W. W. Norton, 1996 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 341 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Neo-Darwinism and the plausible natural selection solution to mystical mysteries

The Blind Watchmaker is first and foremost an important book about evolutionary biology. If you are interested in evolutionary biology, then The Blind Watchmaker is a must have. It is entirely focused on a modern Darwinian view of biology i.e., Neo-Darwinism.

The Blind Watchmaker is often advertised as an Intelligent Design rebuttal when in fact this is a book purely about evolutionary biology that directly, but mostly indirectly, confronts creationists by being one of the most detailed accounts of evolutionary biology and its processes ever written. Much of the evolution here is a development of the technical discoveries of R.A Fisher which are based on the Darwin/Wallace discovery of natural selection.

Dawkins premise for The Blind Watchmaker is a considerably simple one with profound implications. Dawkins believes that by offering absolutely any plausible solution (any at all) to a question, simply wins over an excuse not to answer a question or any attempt at an answer that isn't really an answer at all. One of the most popular types of answers for life form complexity, turns out isn't really an answer at all. These are appeals to supernatural causations. This simply paves the way for science to come up with any, absolutely any, answer that is reasonable, that doesn't include the supernatural. That alone gets attention. Dawkins takes things a few step further. What happens when science not only offers natural plausible solutions to major questions, but starts to provide heaps of evidence to back it up? The Blind Watchmaker is that presentation.

1 - Explaining the Very Improbable
Richard Dawkins explains how complex organic life forms require a very different explanation to formations such as planets, solar systems, mountains and things that human beings make. He goes through Paley's explanation of Intelligent Design in Paley's work `Natural Theology' before explaining that biologists have uncovered an alternative, more powerful, explanation called Natural Selection which was discovered by Darwin and Wallace at the same time. He energizes the reader with concepts such as all the possible combinations of things that do not live. Dawkins sees death as the situation of being unable to maintain a body temperature greater than the world around you. He pulls out an amazing line of reasoning for hierarchical reductionism. Dawkins doesn't argue against Intelligent Design in this chapter, he merely sets up the framework for the argument that will follow.

2 - Good Design
Dawkins displays his talent as an expert biologist by giving a detailed description of the echolocation properties of bats compared with modern sonar. He goes through the history of each discovery and runs a contrast between them using the physics of each. The Doppler Effect gets good coverage. It's an incredible adventure story and makes biology amazingly interesting. Dawkins rounds off by commenting on the argument from incredulity as a bad argument for something. The bad argument is very simple to understand and its ramifications are immense. Because you don't understand something doesn't mean that it isn't true. This realization has an enormous impact on the reader who discovers that lots of people, including proponents of intelligent design, use these types of bad arguments a lot.

3 - Accumulating Small Changes
Dawkins sets up the obvious problem with high complexity in a single step. The chance of it happening is unimaginable. However he shows how hereditary combined with natural selection reduces the chance to an order that gradually evolves in complexity. He tells the story of how he created a computer program, biomorphs, in the 1980s to run a series of inherited traits through successive generations with a simple stick model and began to see the creation of complex designs like insects at rare intervals. Dawkins then brings us into the world of genetic spatial relationships and shows how the complexity of living things is a colossal range of possibilities, in which only an inconceivably tiny quantity that could exist, have ever existed.

4 - Making Tracks through Animal Space
Convergent evolution is explained by natural pressures that cause similar traits to form independently around the planet at different stages in the development of life. Dawkins explains how electric eels work. He gives a quick rundown of plate tectonics and continental drift. This is followed by a heavily comprehensive account of advanced convergent evolution in sporadic parts of the animal kingdom. Dawkins has proved himself not only a profound biologist, but a leading evolutionist that is at least on par with Darwin, if not more so because of recent scientific advancement. This chapter is like something out of The Origin of Species and is one of the many reasons why The Blind Watchmaker is considered a modern scientific masterpiece.

5 - The Power and the Archives
Dawkins takes us into the world of biological data storage and development, DNA. This walkthrough is very immersive and concentrates on Mendel's laws of inheritance before going into extensive detail on molecular biology, especially DNA RNA replication. Chemicals can naturally combine to produce replication qualities and these qualities often produce variation that not only lead to replication, but evolved ones. Dawkins cites several scientific discoveries that verify these findings. This natural mechanism of chemical combinations producing replication properties really hits home. Not only does he prove that evolution will almost certainly arise from these properties but that these properties are expected in a natural environment such as a planet undergoing chemical transformation due to the laws of physics.

6 - Origins and Miracles
Dawkins is good at building up to bigger things. This chapter is just that. Dawkins does two things at once, he shows how human concepts of low probability don't equate to the cosmic reality of low probability, and instead of the primordial soup explanation for replication in molecular biology, uses the Cairns-Smith theory of crystals and their organic relationships. This crystal alternative also paves the way for natural selection in non-living things, in this case river clay spores. He then explains why this low probability cosmic view is the one that represents the universe we live in. He discusses how even with low probability, the chances of hitting on the odds early, maybe more times than once, is why we see low probability emerging earlier and more often than predicted. The way Dawkins carries natural selection into geology is nothing short of mind-blowing.

7 - Constructive Evolution
This chapter deals with the gene centered view of life and evolution where genes combine and find their existence continued in environments where they do well. He describes the Red Queen effect in detail. Using the analogy of an arms race Dawkins depicts how evolution pushes for the development of bodies with complex functions and features. This chapter drives home the power of natural selection in developing complex organisms. It makes too much sense to simply be brushed aside. Only the ignorant or die hard creationist will reject it. At this point any thinking religious person will have to accept that their deity designed the world to work this way whether they like it or not. Many will already be left convinced that there is something seriously bad about arguing a supernatural cause for complex life forms when this kind of quality science explains it so well, so easily.

8 - Explosions and Spirals
Using the Fisher/Lande evolutionary model of sexual selection Dawkins reveals how males carry genes that their daughters will use for the selection of males, and how females carry genes that their sons will use for the selection of females. The result is that Dawkins illustrates why some birds have such large tails, which seem to jeopardize evolutionary utility, to be understood instead in terms of a bravado expression (look at me struggle to survive with this big pretty tail) that attracts female attention. Dawkins then describes how the evolution of the human brain and intelligence is linked to this same evolutionary model of sexual selection. The chapter is rich in analogies that carry forward into cultural and social developments. Once again Dawkins raises our consciousness to things that are in front of our very eyes and yet pass us by. This style of scientific revelation is the hallmark of The Blind Watchmaker and other works by Dawkins.

9 - Puncturing Punctuationism
Dawkins describes schools of thought, both right and wrong, in relation to the topic of evolution, the geological record and dating fossils. Dawkins discusses his classic stretched DC8 analogy. Ernst Mayr gets coverage. The types of evolution in the debate include gradualism, punctuationism, saltationism, macroevolution, speciation, catastrophism, speedism, stasis and discretists. The chapter is mainly a rebuttal to, and an interpretation of, Gould and Eldredge's modern views on punctuated evolution. Dawkins makes you feel like evolution and natural selection are so concrete that evolutionary biologists are a way beyond proving it and are in much deeper territory like discussing how transformations occur in respect to time.

10 - The One True Tree of Life
This is a nice treat. Dawkins covers several ways in which biologists manage to classify living things. Evolution uses phylogenetic taxonomy (or cladistic taxonomy) but there are credible reasons to use other systems such as numerical systems. However Dawkins warns the reader that some of these systems have been used by some biologists to deny evolution. More importantly, Dawkins shows how molecular biology has been employed to refine our understanding of taxonomy. The result is a perfectly nested taxonomy with respect to ancestors based on chemical differences at the molecular level. This is just another way of saying that DNA firmly establishes biological evolution to the point that we can make enormous use of that information and benefit from it, greatly.

11 - Doomed Rivals
Dawkins really drives home natural selection as the only mechanism by which complex organism can evolve by dealing with alternative suggestions for evolution such as Lamarckism, neutralism and mutationism. This chapter harnesses the creative power of natural selection as the only answer to any and all life form complexity, even on a cosmological scale. Dawkins also leaves a resounding assertion that even the idea of a deity has behind it a complexity that needs to be explained. Only the Darwinian solution is one we can apply to any forms of life.

The Blind Watchmaker is powerhouse book on evolution. It doesn't have the full armory of illustrations that many of his other works on evolutionary biology carry and it doesn't have any photographs, so be prepared for lots of reading and lots of thinking. It's a book for brains. You will rarely come across a book designed for the public that makes you work as hard as this does but the reward for doing so is well worth the effort... that is if you can handle its conclusions and implications. Many still find it hard to accept the idea, let alone the reality, that our bodies, minds and families are the products of natural selection. If you can, then this Dawkins hot topic is nothing short of the meaning of life.

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Makes evolution understandable

It is some years since I read this excellent book on evolution. But I still remember it as the book that really laid out the nuts and bolts of the process and made it easy to understand at the "Ah now I see" level. I know of no better layman's guide to evolution.

good addition to The Selfish Gene

Published ten years after The Selfish Gene, this book is just as enlightening and entertaining as that first book by Dawkins. More examples of evolution in the natural world, and more evidence that evolution has indeed shaped the diversity of living things, past and present, on the earth. Very well written, it's a pleasure to read. One criticism of this and especially The Selfish Gene: Dawkins seems to think that there's no or very little selection at the level of the group, and that natural selection takes place at the level of the individual or even his or her DNA. However, I think it's clear that there is a good deal of selective pressure at the level of the group or tribe, and even to some degree at the level of the entire species. If a group of animals dies, that includes every member of the group, so it stands to reason that there should be some selection at the level of the group, even if that selection runs counter to the immediate goals of the individual within that group. In spite of this criticism, any curious person should give this, and The Selfish Gene, a read. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

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An excellent book on evolution

An excellent text on evolution targeted toward the layman. He starts off with simple premises to show that it is possible to create complex structures by means of random mutations and then goes on to show the evidence of evolution throughout the natural world. A large amount of opposition to this book seems to come about because Dawkins has become the public face of atheism in the Western world. This book, however, does not deal with that question in one way or the other. Its main argument is that there is evolution (and evidence for that) and possible mechanisms by which it may have occurred. In all, a very enjoyable and informative book.

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Watch Making

Dawkins has two primary goals: 1. to explain and make plausible Darwinian evolution (implied by the title, "The Blind Watchmaker;") and 2. to refute creationism (implied by the subtitle, "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.") He achieves his first goal with style and aplomb. Those readers interested in evolution will find the book richly rewarding. Not so for those interested in proofs of God's existence. Fortunately, this is a small part of the book.

For the philosophically minded, the gist of Dawkins' anti-creationist argument follows: A watch found in the forest immediately brings to mind the necessary existence of a watchmaker. Creationists view life forms as so many "watches" and conclude that a creator necessarily exists. Dawkins refutes this conclusion by arguing that evolution is sufficient to account for all life and that the random mutations and selection events underlying evolution means there is no plan or design controlling its outcome, i.e. the particular life forms found and even the fact of their existence are matters of chance. Consequently, there is neither design nor designer and creationism is wrong.

At this point, (see pg. 200) Dawkins charitably allows the creationists to belatedly acknowledge their naivety and change their claim from divine creation of life forms to divine creation of the "machinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection, and hence all of evolution, possible." But even then Dawkins still judges creationism to be wrong because this tactic merely shifts the problem of explaining the origin of life forms to the problem of explaining the origin of DNA/protein replication and moreover "leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer." Clearly in this act of generosity, Dawkins has merely erected a strawman that he easily topples.

A creationist worth his salt would skip all the intermediate steps of DNA/protein replication and claim divine creation of all the laws of nature including the laws of evolution. Within this scheme, a creator is responsible for the creation of the universe and evolution is the creator's method of designing life forms. This method might violate our notions of proper (engineering) design and construction but a universal creator might view such a method as efficient and economical and regard particular outcomes as inconsequential. And of course they could be subject to laws we have yet to discover.

Of course if creationists were to adopt this extreme view, Dawkins would be entitled to push his "origin of the Designer" criticism to the extreme conundrum of, "If a Designer created the universe, who created the Designer?" But if so, the creationists could respond that if a Designer created the universe then by implication there is a "somewhere else" (where the Designer normally dwells) and within that somewhere else our concepts and even our logic need not apply; in which case the question, "Who created the Designer?" would be meaningless. We can only guess what Dawkins might say to that.

This is not to argue that Dawkins is wrong in his conclusion regarding creationism, but rather that he hasn't made his case in "The Blind Watchmaker."

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