| We animals are
the most complicated things in the known universe. To the
eighteenth century theologian William Paley, the very complexity
and apparent purposefulness of the living world was overwhelming
evidence for the existence of God. In a famous comparison
he argued that, just as a watch is too complicated, and too
functional, to have sprung into existence by accident, so
too must all living things -- with their far greater complexity
-- be purposefully designed. Paley's case was made with passionate
sincerity, and was informed by the best scholarship of his
day, but it is totally wrong. The analogy between watch and
living organism is false. There may be good reasons for belief
in God, but the argument from design is not one of them.
The true answer to the riddle had to wait
for Charles Darwin in the middle of the last century. Only
then did it become clear that, despite all appearances to
the contrary, there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the
blind forces of physics. A true watchmaker has foresight.
He designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections,
with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection,
the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially nonrandom
process that Darwin discovered, and that we now understand
to be the explanation for the existence and form of all
Iife, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's
eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision,
no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play
the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind
watchmaker.
Darwin's explanation is exceedingly simpIe,
and yet many still seem to have difficulties with it. For
instance, some people have gained the profoundly wrong impression
that natural selection amounts to nothing more than blind
chance. But the main problem, Richard Dawkins believes,
is not that the idea of evolution by natural selection is
too difficult to understand; rather it is that many people
who are well able to understand it simply don't believe
it. They don't find it plausible.
In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard
Dawkins patiently and clearly identifies those aspects of
evolution that people find hard to believe, and removes
the barriers to credibility one by one. At the same time
he never Ioses his sense of wonder -- a reverence and awe
to rival Paley's -- at the beauty and complexity of living
things. A brilliantly written work of advocacy, The Blind
Watchmaker makes the case that evolution by natural
section is a big enough theory to answer the biggest question
of all: Why do we exist?
Richard Dawkins was born in 1941. He was
educated at Oxford University, and after graduation remained
there to work for his doctorate with the Nobel Prize-winning
ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was an assistant
professor of zoology at the University of California at
Berkeley. Since 1970 he has been a lecturer in animal behavior
at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College.
Richard Dawkins' first book was The
Selfish Gene. It became an immediate international best
seller and was translated into ten languages; it has sold
more than 150,000 copies in English alone. Its sequel, The
Extended Phenotype, followed in 1982.
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