Product Description

Acclaimed as the most influential work on evolution written in the last hundred years, The Blind Watchmaker offers an inspiring and accessible introduction to one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. A brilliant and controversial book which demonstrates that evolution by natural selection - the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process discovered by Darwin - is the only answer to the biggest question of all: why do we exist?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1281 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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:

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.

About the Author
In 1995 Richard Dawkins became the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the bestselling author of THE SELFISH GENE, CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE (Penguin, 1996) and UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW (Penguin, 1998).

Customer Reviews

Badly written and unbalanced
For me, this book was preaching to the converted - I have a good understanding of evolution and can't see how any reasonable scientist could argue with the position spelled out by Dawkins in this book. However, I cannot agree at all that he is good at communicating these ideas - his writing and arguments are laboured, convoluted and actually rather confusing. In particular, the description of molecular genetics is awful and without extensive prior knowledge of this I would have to have read the (albeit limited - see below) coverage of this area many times over to understand it.

I personally found reading the author's smug or arrogant criticisms of others in his field or opponents amusing - perhaps others might not. The problem for the 'Blind Watchmaker' is that this often appears to be the author's primary objective, rather than explaining evolution - hence my challenge that it is not balanced. In my opinion, this comes at the expense of far too little coverage of recombination, evolution of social behaviour or basic Mendelian genetics, just to name a few areas fundamental to understanding evolution that are either not covered well or at all.

In summary, this book might have been better co-authored with a molecular geneticist and an animal behaviourist. The content of the 'Blind Watchmaker' is narrow in scope and not well written. I have `God Delusion' on my shelf and I shall now be selling rather than reading it.

The Classic Explanation of Evolution
Back in the 18th or 19th Century, a man named William Paley came up with a very clever argument to prove the existance of god: Say you find a watch lying on the beach. Just by looking at the watch, you "know" it was made for a purpose. Such an odd collection of materials did not assemble itself. It is not an accident, and it must have been designed by someone specially for the purpose of telling time. Where there is a watch, there must be an intelligent watch maker. Well, human beings are much better designed than watches, so we too must have been created by an intelligent designer. That designer is god.

That's a brilliant argument, and it sure would have convinced me. Dawkins takes that argument, and smashes it to pieces. (He does not insult Paley, of course. Neither did Einstien insult Newton).

Dawkins explains how an object (or plant or animal) can be "designed" by the simple process of natural selection, without anyone to do the selecting. All it takes is replication (sexual reproduction) and limited resources. The laws of physics do the rest. The species that are most successful at surviving tend to survive -- it sounds so simple when you think of it that way. So, each generation has more of the successful models and less of the unsuccessful ones.

Once in a while random copying errors occur. Most of these make the plant or animal less successful, and those genes are not passed on. Once in a while, however, the error leads to a better design, and the new gene wins out. Over long, long periods of time, very efficient and very complicated designs can and will show up, even though they have not been designed by anyone. Just as the Grand Canyon was created by a long slow process, so were we.

If you want to understand evolution, this is the place to start (Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and many others will pick up from there). If you believe in intelligent design, and want to keep believing, do NOT read this book.

Recommended to all Creationists
In The God Delusion, Dawkins notes that The Blind Watchmaker (and possibly The Selfish Gene) hadn't been written to attack religion, but had succeeded in converting many people (notably Douglas Adams) to atheism anyway. Having read The Blind Watchmaker, I can understand why. Dawkins does an excellent job of countering a range of arguments against evolution, explaining how and why natural selection works, and why it's a much simpler - and better - solution than any of the alternatives.

To anyone who doesn't believe in evolution, I recommend this book. I'd be very surprised if anyone who really understands evolution would still disagree with it, and this book is an excellent route to understanding evolution.