The Blind Watchmaker – Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design Reissue - Softcover

Dawkins, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393315703 ISBN 13: 9780393315707

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

Product Description:

The Blind Watchmaker Demonstrates that theory of evolution by natural selection discovered by Charles Darwin - is only answer to biggest question of all: why do we exist? Full description

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 this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0393315703
• ISBN 13: 9780393315707
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496