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Loading... The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (original 1986; edition 1996)by Richard Dawkins
Work InformationThe Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (1986)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. As per the synopsis: The Blind Watchmaker is the seminal text for understanding evolution today. In the eighteenth century, theologian William Paley developed a famous metaphor for creationism: that of the skilled watchmaker. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins crafts an elegant riposte to show that the complex process of Darwinian natural selection is unconscious and automatic. If natural selection can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is a blind one—working without foresight or purpose. In an eloquent, uniquely persuasive account of the theory of natural selection, Dawkins illustrates how simple organisms slowly change over time to create a world of enormous complexity, diversity, and beauty. --------------------- This book is in part an evidenced argument for, and an explanation of evolution. As such it includes lengthy clarifications of how to interpret the terms used (there are fine distinctions in a number of different terms, such as with macromutations). In addition to delineating cumulative progression and natural selection, it also ranges in dissecting the utterly impossible, the improbable, and probable. A companion book that includes more functional detail is Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable, and another more recent book that gets into detailed evolution workings is Sean B. Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom. This my second reading since about 1990, and what I still see in this writing is purpose without foresight. That is, given all the variations and complexity of extant biological life and extinctions that we know of, and awareness of many more we don't have evidence of, taken together with what we have discovered about cumulative progression and natural selection, a logical mind can see the reality of evolution over creationism and other lacking theories. That especially where objective inquiry seeks to free the mind from the human bubble, contrasted with creationism which in ignoring growing empirical understanding is supposition to dominate minds. Their are details that aren't yet fully understood, but the only real mystery remaining is how a self-replicating molecule that life descended from came to be, when and how did DNA/protein machinery develop in such, and if there was only one occurrence. The growing empirical evidence points to the path of our being as a punctuated cumulative progression under the influence of natural selection. How we ended up in the pickle we are in is due to natural selection being a blind, unconscious, automatic process that selects for seeming survivability and reproduction in an environment — genes are selected first and foremost, not for their intrinsic qualities, but by virtue of their interactions with their environments. The selection process has though, albeit selectively and possibly unintentionally, endowed us with the intelligence to potentially see where this path is leading us in a successively deteriorating conducive biosphere. All life forms alter their habitat, spurring environmental changes in geological time that adaptive evolution attempts to keep pace with through natural selection, but our weedy species is altering the environment at such an accelerated pace that we are witnessing worsening environmental changes and excessive extinctions within our lifetimes. One aspect that a serious reader might glean from this book isn't stated in so many words. That is, the more biologically complicated a life form is, the smaller the adaptive evolution steps because of the greater population of genes that must be interacted with in the life form. Thus, if significant, detrimental biosphere changes occur faster than adaptive evolution steps can keep pace . . . If one is interested in their and their children's futures, a realistic understanding of how we came to be, and the evolutionary baggage that includes, is important in learning what we have to overcome. Thus, this book is a good first step. Additional understanding to pursue are life sciences such as ecology (biodiversity and ecosystem balance are essential components in slowing biosphere changes). Great read. Despite what the title and some negative reviews may lead you to believe, this book is not so much anti-creationist as pro-Darwinist. Using rigorous logic and arguments rooted in biology, probability theory and information theory, Dawkins proves that Darwinism is still the most plausible and consistent theory explaining the emergence and development of life on Earth. Even though a big part of the book is dedicated to debunking creationist arguments, it also includes the critique of competing scientific theories (for example those that do not consider natural selection to be the primary driving force behind evolution). As the title's extension spells out, this is a definitive (as of '87) rebuttal against all comers in favor of Darwinism, but don't let my saying so prove it. Read it for yourself. All his arguments are crystal clear, but he takes extra time to caricature the caricature of Darwinists, pointing out exactly how the ad absurdum argument really works while also elucidating the fine points of what Darwinism IS versus what it is NOT. He steps us through the first third of the book showing us how Selection works: from an energy standpoint, a competition standpoint, and a sexual standpoint... from the basic building blocks of proteins to more and more complex forms of DNA and the combo cells that collect all the wonderful multicellular creations, including bacteria, that eventually wind up creating us. The descriptions are quite beautiful and clear and all the while, we've got all the foundations for life... without Intelligent Design. The argument is simple, of course. If we can explain everything, and I mean everything that is life and physics, then what purpose does adding a superfluous layer to the explanation serve? This is ten years worth of hate mail for the author, people. He has been beset on all sides with genuinely curious and well-meaning seekers of the god-fearing sort and inundated with screaming lunatics telling him he'll burn in hell for his first book, [b:The Selfish Gene|61535|The Selfish Gene|Richard Dawkins|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1366758096s/61535.jpg|1746717], which, by the way, didn't really give a rat's ass about creationism or the people who support it. It just laid out a very cogent theory that fit all the copious mountains of data in biology. And yet, after that point, a Mr. Dawkins who professes not to want or need a PR team or lawyers, decides to put his foot down and tackle the problem that has reared its muti-angled head in his direction and DEFEND Darwinism. He does so beautifully, I might add. Every step of the way, he defines the complaints with due diligence and proceeds to demolish them sonar-producing batlike grace, with light humor, sharp intellect, and sometimes he makes of his opponents an overzealous meal. Can you blame him? Granted, by this point it's only been a decade of Creationist hate. Give it a decade or a decade and a half more before we see a truly flame worthy attack from Mr.Dawkins. I'm looking forward to seeing some of it in his books. I hope it's there and not just in his interviews which I still haven't seen. Alas. Seriously, though, this book is pretty wonderful for its lucid and quoteworthy passages and vivid descriptions of how Darwinism works, from gene level to the kinds of time-spans that can only be described as geological when it comes to real changes in evolution. I particularly loved the fact that he used computer terminology to describe how our genes are nothing more than complex computers. I've heard this before, of course, but the way he laid it out was particularly enlightening. This stuff is pretty damn great. Just from the science viewpoint, even leaving out the whole defense, it's well worth reading and not nearly as acerbic or rabid as certain other mass-produced troll-attacks make him appear. But then again, I've only read one of his later books, the [b:The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True|11256979|The Magic of Reality How We Know What's Really True|Richard Dawkins|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327883246s/11256979.jpg|16183684], which was just a charming bi-modal description of science versus magical thinking which also happened to "gently" draw people away from having to add that extra layer of explanation to reality. :) I guess I'll see what the other books bring, no?
Almost everything about this book – the instances, the writing, the passion, the lyrical imagery – confirms again and again that there is nothing dry about science, nothing heartless about research, and nothing unfeeling about the way a biologist looks at an animal. Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inContainsAwardsNotable Lists
References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in English (16)From the author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker has been acclaimed as the most influential work on evolution in the last hundred years. In 1802 the Rev. William Paley's argued in Natural Theology 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 Richard Dawkins, and in this brilliant and controversial book, the acclaimed evolutionary biologist sets out to demonstrate that the theory of evolution by natural selection - the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process discovered by Charles Darwin - is the only answer to the biggest question of all: why do we exist? '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' To Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker is nature itself, gradually forming order from the very building-blocks of life: DNA. 'This might just be the most important evolution book since Darwin' John Gribbin 'Richard Dawkins has updated evolution ... his subject is nothing less than the meaning of life' The Times 'Enchantingly witty and persusive ... pleasurably intelligible to the scientifically illiterate' Observer Richard Dawkins is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature, and Vice President of the British Humanist Association. He was first catapulted to fame with The Selfish Gene, which he followed with a string of bestselling books: The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Unweaving the Rainbow, and an impassioned defence of atheism, The God Delusion. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)576.82Natural sciences and mathematics Life Sciences, Biology Genetics and evolution Evolution Theories of evolutionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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And lots of plain good critical thinking at work...
On the down side, I found some of the discussions a bit too subtle to be important to me... ( )