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

Great explanation of evolution

This book is an excellent explanation of evolution. It's a little on the dry side, and people who already know quite a bit about evolution will find it slow in the beginning. It picks up, though. Dawkins starts off with simple concepts and gradually builds into the more complex understandings of evolution. He explains everything very clearly, using analogies to help visualize some of the more difficult concepts. This book does a great job of clearing up a lot of the misunderstandings of what evolution is really about and putting a beautiful concept in science into terms any lay person can understand. Dawkins makes evolution impossible to dispute once you have read his book. I think most people who try to argue with evolution could only possibly be doing so because they do not fully understand it.

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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.

Please Read (Especially if You're Religious)!

I have a degree in English and American Literature and my minor was in History. In other words, I'm not great at science or math. But I've always been interested in some aspects of science and biology and evolution happen to be subjects I like. I'm not a complete moron when it comes to scientific subjects but I'm sure any 8th grade science geek could probably run rings around me.

Consequently, this book by Richard Dawkins is made for me. The way I understood it it was written with a general reader in mind. The book is well written and plausibly argued. And as long as you pay attention and follow the logic of the author's arguments it's not that hard to follow.

The basic premise of the book is to show how life could appear in the universe without a creator or any pre-conceived notion of design (the whole "Intelligent Design" argument now being debated across the U.S.). Dawkins obviously loves Darwin and bases his argument on cumulative evolution over billions of years (the age of the Earth [and please shut-up you stupid creationists trying to argue that the Earth is only 6,000 years old!]). Dawkins patiently explains how such a slow and random process like natural selection could evolve our life-forms over vast amounts of time. Like I said, I'm no great scientist, but the argument makes perfect sense and I still fail to see why anyone tries to argue otherwise (except, of course, for religious reasons, but those are very silly reasons).

Overall, this is a good way to try to understand evolution in more depth than the few words hopefully given to you in high school and college. There are a few parts which I found to be boring (like the taxonomy debates and different schools of thought in taxonomy) but I think this book is an important read--especially now that religious nuts are trying to dumb people down.

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