The Blind Watchmaker[Cover image may differ]

This book is about evolution: it is described as a very large amount of steps of very small improvements. Richard goes into great detail to help us understand how it works. I enjoyed reading it as it takes theory a step further and I regret having not read this book years earlier. Richard follows logic if we accept A then it means the following. He also explores the opposite if A isn't true. He (and Darwin) logically rejects evolution as having anything to do with divine intervention because if that is needed to explain any steps in evolution it means the theory is false. He makes the reader understand that this process is so complex and played at multiple levels - from genes and cells, to species to planetary conditions - and over a time scale that the human mind cannot comprehend. It may seem magical or divine but it really isn't. When reading the chapters about this I had to think about a conversation at the start of Deep Space Nine about time: "What comes before now is not different than what is now or what is to come. It is one's existence". If we were to meet such a being we would not understand this with our human mind. For a human a decade is quite long, on geological time scale 60,000 years is an instant. We look at the animals and plants today and we should realize they are all the outcome of a billion years long evolutionary process. The fossil record is extremely limited, so we miss many steps and sometimes we aren't even looking in the right area. In Dawkins' view life does not have a meaning - 42 might be the right answer after all. It's interesting as recently I learned about another theory that looked at life as a way to recirculate nutrition - each animal and plant is part of a system. Dawkins would reject that and the system is there because of life. He spent the last chapter debunking 'alternative theories'. In a way it's quite academic but it does show clearly where Richard stands. Unfortunately he does not know how life started and he postulates some theories that sound the same as how we explain the universe using terms like dark energy and dark matter - it could be true but for now it's not more than an educated guess. I understand that this is still one of the large mysteries of life. As the book was written a few decades ago, some of the examples that Richard uses sounds dated - it does not take anything away from his message, but I can see my daughter for example not being able to understand what he means with a laser disc or a DC-8. If you are religious and have an open mind I would recommend reading it - Dawkins is not against religion in a way that he condemns religious people, it's more that it is not the right explanation for how life is today. There is no Watchmaker at work.

You can sum up the idea at the heart of this book in one sentence: that all life on Earth arose because molecules developed a way of self- replicating, and that life evolved into more sophisticated forms because these replications were subject to random variation and natural selection. This giant and powerful theory is explained in detail from a number of different angles - mostly attempts to quash rival theories. For the better part, the book is great but I did find some chapters a little tedious. For instance, I now understand that 'taxonomy' is an incredibly important part of the theory but the chapter dedicated to it didn't, for me, lend any weight to the overall argument. However, there are some brilliant chapters too. The description of how bats 'see' the world using only sound ('echo-location') is fascinating - it underlines the idea that our use of light waves ('vision') is just one of a number of alternative sensory methods that have evolved on Earth. I also liked the parallel Prof. Dawkins draws between DNA and information technology (even going as far as suggesting that since DNA is just a way of passing on information, once machines find a way of self-replicating, computers might out-evolve it). Also fascinating is the discussion of 'positive' and 'negative' feedback loops. Previously, I only understood these in engineering terms. Understanding how they apply to any system (including evolution) is an immensely powerful idea. There is one idea that this book planted in my mind that is highly depressing. If Darwin was right (and it seems very likely), does it not mean that life as we know it is utterly bereft of meaning? Obviously, we are not here by accident (natural selection is not an accidental process) but, however wonderful and awe-inspiring the idea of evolution is, it essentially means we are here - in this form - because of the random variations of molecular chains. It's not a great feeling. NOTE TO COMPUTER GAMES PROGRAMMERS: Read chapter 3. There could be a positively useful job for you out there!

Well, first and foremost, excellent product phenomenal delivery time. Well pleased. My eyes are failing me now, but thankfully my cognition is well intact, so Audio CD's are becoming the norm for me. I will quote you exactly the best definition I have found on this book. "Despite the theory's age, the Blind Watchmaker is as prescient and timely 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 non-random process Darwin discovered - has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, tin is a BLIND WATCHMAKER". I am left 'speechless' to add anything to that with one exception. Both Richard Dawkins and his wife Lala Ward narrate this unabridged Audio CD with stupendous oratory passion, that you even feel more of the 'genius' that is Dawkins and Darwin being reveal in it's wonderful logic to you. Wonderful stuff. Highly highly recommended to either the less able to read, or if your eyes work fine, then buy the book (or the CD-to me it's a winner!) and be 'gobsmacked' at the natural intelligence of the author to lay down such a wonderful and beautifully constructed argument for what is really just 'common-sense'! R.

I started reading "The Selfish Gene", "The God Delusion" and then this book. I have not been able to put it down since I have started the 1st page. This is a fantastic read. Not as complex as some parts of the Selfish Gene, this book reads far easier, it is just as interesting and well articulated. This is Dawkins at his best.I highly recommend this book as yet another engaging wake up call to those who have been brainwashed into believing that humanity's greatest aspect, our ability to reason, is "sinful". Read and be enlightened.

I respect Prof. Dawkins opinion and agree with his view, but I found his writing style repetitive and self indulgent. Over labours points and is quite annoying at times. If I didn't already believe in Darwinian Natural Selection, this book would probably not convince me, if indeed I could bear to finish it.

I've read this before, and it is still brilliant. The thing is it could do with a bit of an update. His computer-generated life-forms are well out of date now. I think that chapter needs to be dropped, and he could write, instead, about how computer characters have evolved from those days of early experiments to the super fast, semi-intelligent, partly AI, partly self-aware characters that we have today, and also write a bit about the coming possibilities of AI, and the new theories of nested realities. This would mean also slightly modifying parts of the rest of the book where he refers to the bio-morphs. He'd need instead to make more modern references to existing advancements in computer science and the evolution of characters in the alternate realities we have created. If you read this, Richard Dawkins, I'll do it for you so long as you give me credit!

This is the third of Dawkins' books that I have read and it is arguably more accessible than the other two (The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype) which were much more concerned with the mechanics of evolution and the biological theories underpinning them. The Blind Watchmaker has a more philosophical tone, although biological examples are used extensively to illustrate the author's points. This book is an extended explanation of why the appearance of design in the animal world is an illusion and how organised complexity can emerge from a sequence of cumulative, small changes via natural selection. Of course, most rational folk accept that evolution is as proven as a theory ever gets but it is a fascinating subject and one well worth knowing more about, even if only to counter the feeble attempts of the non-rational to contradict it. Dawkins has an engaging, affable tone in the book, yet is easy to understand. The section on the development of echo-location in bats is one of the books high points, as is the discussion on why the African widow bird has a seemingly impractically long tail . The Blind Watchmaker is not without its faults, however. An entire chapter devoted to taxonomy seemed to have no relevance to the main narrative and I skim-read the chapter on a computer simulation of biomorphs as it was heavily repetitive and felt a bit tenuous as a model for evolution. There are some surprising (to me) insights here. I had no idea that so little of the genetic information in our cells was actually used - apparently only about 1%. I did not know that the tripling in the size of the human brain was one of the fastest known evolutionary changes, taking a paltry three million years. Dawkins also skewers some common myths about evolution, pointing out, for example, that the entire theory of evolution would collapse in an instant, were a 500 million year-old fossilised mammalian skull to be discovered, refuting the creationist canard that evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology. Overall, this is an entertaining and informative read.

I came to this book late in life - long after it had already achieved deserved fame - I found myself agreeing with almost every word ( and quietly cursing the fact that hadn't written it years ago!) Richard Dawkins is a naturally communicative scientist, has a wonderful conversational style that engages from the start and guides the reader through simple steps to explain how our amazing universe - and indeed - life itself doesn't need a supernatural power.