Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker

Evolutionary Biology Remains a Hot Button Issue Twenty Years Later

Dec 17, 2008

In 1986, The Blind Watchmaker laid out the evolutionary foundations that give our natural world the appearance of design. Two decades later, the book still holds up.

In 1986, there was no world wide network of computers that would allow the knowledge of evolutionary biology to be compressed, stylized and shared by millions. At the time, a book was the best piece of software available to anyone interested in learning about the fascinating history of biological adaptation from the earliest forms of life to its current complexity. In many ways, a book is still the best software platform for scientific knowledge. It's immutable form makes fact checking and error finding simple and allows scientists and laymen alike to compare twenty (or fifty, or one hundred and fifty) year old knowledge against modern data and theory.

Evolution for the Masses

Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker is popular science writing at its best, never speaking down to the audience but proceeding with the awareness that most readers will not have a deep background in the subject matter and are therefore in need of a patient guide.

Dawkins takes the reader through the basics of the argument from design put forth by 18th Century theologian William Paley, who likened creation to finding a watch on the heath. Finding such a device, he would instantly be able to postulate the existence of a watch-maker, and so it must be with a creation as complex as the human eye or the wing of a bird. To Paley, such complexity demanded the existence of an intelligent creator.

In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins follows the evidence of geology, paleontology and molecular biology that leads to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection and explains the apparent design of various biological forms. In millions of years and over hundreds of thousands of generations, tiny mutations have accumulated to give biological entities the appearance of design, but no designer was involved. Nature is the blind watchmaker.

What Good is Half an Eye?

The explanation of seemingly irreducibly complex organs and systems such as eyes and wings is one of tiny increment. Using the example of bats and other organisms, the evolutionary explanation of such sensory systems as sight, hearing and smell is shown to be a simple progression in tiny steps from the simple to the complex or perhaps from the complex to the simple, should simple provide a reproductive advantage. Evolution is shown to be the simplest, most elegant explanation of why bats have better hearing than humans, why eagles have better eyesight than humans and why sharks have a such a vastly superior sense of smell.

A Dated Approach

While none of the major assertions of The Blind Watchmaker have been overturned by current science, Dawkins' reliance on computer models created on a then cutting edge Macintosh computer do tend to date the work. Like Darwin's hand drawn plates in The Origin of Species, Dr. Dawkins crude computer creations serve to cement The Blind Watchmaker indelibly as a product of its time and can be somewhat distracting to a Twenty-First Century reader accustomed to slick computer graphics being used to illustrate everything from scientific concepts to the marketing of hemorrhoid remedies.

Despite their crudity, the tiny pictograms created on an underpowered computer some two decades past do serve to illustrate the overwhelming power of the combination of selective pressure and geological time scales.

Rivals to the Blind Watchmaker

"No serious biologist doubts the fact that evolution has happened, nor that all living creatures are cousins of one another." Thus opens the final chapter of The Blind Watchmaker. From this, the reader might assume that there are no challenges to The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. In the 150 years since Darwin and Wallace first expressed the idea, there have been a few genuine challenges to the Theory, but none have withstood the rigors of testing.

The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection states that offspring mutate randomly, while the pressure of natural selection acts in a non-random fashion. Lamarckism would have it the other way around, suggesting that an adult would pass non-random traits on to its offspring to help it deal with random factors in the environment, such as a giraffe passing a longer neck to its child because it had been stretching to reach leaves high up in the trees.

The final chapter of The Blind Watchmaker is devoted to exploring and scientifically refuting these sorts of challenges to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

The copyright of the article Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker in Science Books is owned by James Richardson. Permission to republish Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.