Table Of ContentRichard Dawkins
THE BLIND WATCHMAKER
Contents
Introduction to the 2006 edition
Preface
Chapter 1 Explaining the Very Improbable
Chapter 2 Good Design
Chapter 3 Accumulating Small Change
Chapter 4 Making Tracks Through Animal Space
Chapter 5 The Power and The archives
Chapter 6 Origins and Miracles
Chapter 7 Constructive Evolution
Chapter 8 Explosions and Spirals
Chapter 9 Puncturing Punctuationism
Chapter 10 The One True Tree of Life
Chapter 11 Doomed Rivals
Appendix (1991): Computer Programs and ‘The Evolution of Evolvability’
Bibliography
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi 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. In
1970 he became a Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford University and a Fellow of
New College. In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Richard Dawkins’s first book, The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition, 1989),
became an immediate international bestseller and was translated into all the
major languages. Its sequel, The Extended Phenotype, followed in 1982. His
other bestsellers include The Blind Watchmaker (1986; Penguin, 1988), River
Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996; Penguin, 1997),
Unweaving the Rainbow (Penguin, 1999) and The Ancestor’s Tale (2004).
Richard Dawkins won both the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los
Angeles Times Literary Prize in 1987 for The Blind Watchmaker. The television
film of the book, shown in the Horizon series, won the Sci-Tech Prize for the
Best Science Programme of 1987. He has also won the 1989 Silver Medal of the
Zoological Society of London and the 1990 Royal Society Michael Faraday
Award for the furtherance of the public understanding of science. In 1994 he
won the Nakayama Prize for Human Science and in 1995 was awarded an
Honorary D.Litt. by the University of St Andrews and by the National
University, Canberra. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature and won the Cosmos International Prize.
To my parents
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE BLIND WATCHMAKER
‘The most brilliant contemporary preacher of Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution … Dawkins has done it again and defended modern Darwinist
orthodoxy with wit and passion’
Daily Telegraph
‘A lovely book, original and lively, it expounds the ins and outs of evolution
with enthusiastic clarity, answering, at every point, the cavemen of creationism’
Isaac Asimov
‘It succeeds quite brilliantly. Most particularly, again and again, it brings home
the nature and force of the central evolutionary mechanism of natural selèction
in a way that I have never seen or felt previously. The closest analogy I can think
of is Galileo’s Dialogues which made reasonable the Copernican Revolution,
and I hope I will not be thought to be pushing things to an embarrassing point if
I say that Dawkins’ book can be compared to Galileo’s, not only in type but in
standard’
Professor Michael Ruse
‘He disposes of the arguments for God the Designer without diminishing our
sense of the mystery and complexity of our world … indeed he increases our
sense of wonder. Dawkins’s speculative attempts to account for human self-
consciousness and our interest in our own doings are ingenious and daring’
A. G. Cairns-Smith, Independent
‘I admired Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker – or Son of Selfish Gene:
enough to say that it shares the grave wit and thrilling godlessness of the earlier
book’
Martin Amis, Book of the Year, Observer
‘A full-throated defence of orthodox neo-Darwinism … He robustly sees off
creationists on the right and the spectrum of critics of his version of orthodoxy
on the left … There is much which is good and not merely clever about this
book’
Steven Rose, New Statesman
‘One great virtue of this book is to demonstrate the incompatibility of
Darwinism and theism. The author points out the inconsistency of these
sophisticated theologians who wish to appear in step with modern science, while
at the same time retaining a corner for God in their cosmogony’
Churchman
‘Brilliant exposition, tightly argued but kept readable by plentiful recourse to
analogies and examples … The Blind Watchmaker shows what a convincing
scientific argument looks like; it is popular science at its best. An invigorating
minor theme is provided by the sideswipes that Dawkins hands out to
creationists, erring colleagues, misguided interlopers from other sciences, and
the media that gleefully misreport their muddleheaded musings. Highly
recommended’
The Times
‘An astonishingly lucid exposition of Darwinism … Dawkins is a born writer
with an unmatched gift for the brilliant metaphor, the inspired syntactic switch,
and the relevant zoological detail. The Blind Watchmaker is entertaining as well
as engrossing: Dawkins’s most wonderful book’
Francisco J. Ayala, Professor of Genetics,
University of California
‘For those who like good writing, tight argument and unpulled punches, this is a
satisfying book. One by one, the author takes the arguments of Darwin’s critics
and drives a juggernaut of logic through them’
Economist
‘Dr Dawkins is determined to hunt down any theologian who tries to prove, or
even suggest, God by finding gaps in neo-Darwinian biology … And it is surely
important that those who would defend religious belief in the age of science
should grasp the full force of the explanation of nature which has no need of
God’
David L. Edwards, Church Times
‘A magical guided tour through the land of the blind watchmaker … apparently
dry-as-dust intellectual theories and concepts can, in the end, lead to the most
unimaginably glorious, majestic, just plain thrilling products … so with
Dawkins’ book’
Professor Angus Martin, Zoo News
‘He succeeds admirably in showing how natural selection allows biologists to
dispense with such notions as purpose and design and he does so in a manner
readily intelligible to the modern reader’
Michael T. Ghiselin, The New York Times
