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.

Reader Reviews:

Badly written and unbalanced (1/1 people found this helpful)

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 (1/3 people found this helpful)

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 (2/3 people found this helpful)

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.

What a profound confidence in "Materialism" the author has! (0/15 people found this helpful)

The book has been given so many praises from so many prestigious persons & media; hence may be a good book to read. But from my point of view, the author is as completely hypnotized by "Materialism" as the so-called creationists are so hypnotized by "God" the Father. I wonder why scientists do not try to put every life on a horizontal line instead of putting Mankind on the top of a tree! It is very dangerous for intelligent Mankind to fall from the top
Great Britain is a very interesting country in the point that she is the mother country of both Darwinism and the Society for Psychical Research. We lost Prof. Ian Stevenson last year (in 2007), who was the president of the SPR for 1989. Obvious truth is that: (1) if Prof. Stevenson's compiled data plus the official document of a Japanese boy "Katsugoro (in 1810)" of "reincarnation" is true, then all theories based on materialism surely fail, (2) if only a fraction of those compiled files include the truth, then the same will be concluded, (3) if "the missing 21 grams" of Dr. Duncan MacDougall (in 1907) cannot be refuted scientifically, then the same will be concluded.
That is, all our current scientific theories are sitting on the top of several big bombs, which might shatter all these materialistic ideas.

A life-changing book (4/4 people found this helpful)

As another reviewer has stated, this book is truly life-changing. Before reading it I was open-minded about all sorts of vaguely 'spiritual' ideas, for the (very common) reason that there seemed to be certain Big Questions that could not be fully explained by science. In particular, life itself.
This is in fact poppycock - Darwinism provides that explanation. But sadly, lots of people misunderstand Darwinism; and then look for weaknesses in their WRONG interpretation of it.
Dawkins does an incredibly thorough job of explaining how Natural Selection actually works, using some great metaphors along the way to make the whole thing very enjoyable reading. [NB Dawkins is always very clear not to confuse a metaphor with reality - unlike some of his reviewers!]
This is not just a text book on Darwinism; it is a thorough rebuttal of the religious argument that there must be a God because "there is no other feasible explanation".
There are a few negative reviews on this site. But it is clear they are all written by religious people with a major axe to grind. ALL of their criticisms seem to be based on wilful misinterpretations. In particular, there is actually lots of evidence to support the theory of Natural Selection. And Dawkins explanation of the eye (human or otherwise) makes perfect sense.
Read the book yourself, and form your own judgement.
And one final point - for me life as an atheist is definitely not devoid of meaning!

Richard Dawkins

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