Published by Penguin, 2000, softcover, index, 419 pages, condition: new.
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 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 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 The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Unweaving the Rainbow, and an impassioned defence of atheism, The God Delusion.
Dawkins loves explaining evolutionary theory, and this is one of his best books. My favourite bit is the section on long-tailed birds (peacocks, etc). From the point of view of simple utility, they are rather baffling. What use could you possibly have for that long, stupid tail?
But, as Dawkins keeps reminding us, it's not about survival of the species, or even of the individual, but rather of the gene. Suppose there's a sex-linked male gene that disposes towards long tails, and a sex-linked female gene that disposes towards finding long tails attractive. A child born of a union between two individuals carrying these genes will be likely to have both of them. Hence, if it's male, it'll have a long tail, and if it's female it will prefer males with long tails. If this combination becomes common, long-tailed males will have a larger and larger advantage in terms of being preferred by females. Tails will lengthen until the practical downside (being unable to fly, avoid predators, etc) counterbalances the upside of efficiently attracting potential mates.
