The Blind Watchmaker

"This is the book that really introduced me to Richard Dawkins. It came out before I got to know him as well as I do know. It struck me as a perfect title, for one thing. It refers, obviously, to the religious idea that the universe and all the wonders of nature could not possibly have resulted from accident of evolution. They talk about the blind watchmaker not being able to make a watch, but if you’re given an almost infinite number of combinations and permutations of materials and situations, the world will come about. Or it may not. In our case, it came about. You’re here, I’m here, and I’m very happy about that. Of course. There’s no evidence for its claims whatsoever. In most cases, religious “miracles” – and I use that word in quotation marks all the time – don’t have any evidence behind them, except that they’re written about in a big black book that people like to refer to every now and then, with no authority, history or accuracy. It’s even more doubtful than paranormal claims. Well, if you want to think about them figuratively, I suppose you can make anything out of them that you want. I’m only concerned with those people who believe in them in a literal sense."

"It was a tough decision. Climbing Mount Improbable is a similar book that’s very good, The Extended Phenotype is another one. I would say read all of Dawkins – that would be my recommendation. But if I had to pick just one self-contained book that lays out Dawkins’s philosophy and methodology, and shows his literary skills, I would have to pick this one. His most famous book is The Selfish Gene because it lays out the gene-centred view of evolution, but it’s a bit of a tough slog. All the stuff you find in it you can also find in The Blind Watchmaker . This is the original version of intelligent design. It comes from William Paley, who was a natural theologian in the 18th century. Paley wrote a book called Natural Theolo gy to try to explain why the perfection of animals testifies to the existence of God. He says, “I’m walking across Hampstead Heath, my foot pitches up against a watch, I look at this thing and it’s marvellous. It has these cogs and gears, it tells the time and the time is correct. It is extremely well made for what it does”. Then he says, “Look at an animal”. In my book I use the example of a woodpecker. It has a tough beak, it has stiff tail feathers to prop it against a tree, it can hit its head 15 times a second at 16 miles an hour against the trunk without hurting its brain because it has padding around its brain. Its eyes close at the moment of striking so it doesn’t get woodchips in its eyes, it has feathers in its nostrils so it doesn’t inhale woodchips. A woodpecker is the organic equivalent of a watch. Paley’s view is that since you can infer the existence of a designer or watchmaker from looking at the perfection of a watch, you must be able to infer the existence of a designer from looking at the perfection of animals and plants. That was basically the worldview of all biologists before Darwin: that the perfection of nature testified to the glory of the Creator. That’s what Darwin changed in The Origin . He showed that that perfection of design could be arrived at through a completely blind, purposeless and materialistic process. That is the reason why Darwinism is so despised by religious people. I can’t speak for Richard, but it’s pretty clear that natural selection, which is what the book is about, is the blind watchmaker. It produces things as intricate as a watch and even more so. Any animal is infinitely more complex than a watch is, but that animal has been produced by the simple, materialistic, blind, purposeless process of natural selection. The whole point of Richard’s book is to show that we no longer need recourse to a celestial designer to explain the wonders of nature and the marvellous “design” of organisms. It’s implicit in Darwin, but he doesn’t go into detail. He did not go into a polemic about how his theory would replace natural theology. Darwin was not a polemicist in the way Richard is, hammering it into people. Yes, he’s working out the details and showing all the amazing ways that we’ve learned, since Darwin, that this blind materialistic process operates. He goes through kin selection, arms races, all sorts of modern aspects of evolution. A lot of it I knew, but not all of it. Even when you know this stuff, there are two things about Dawkins that it make profitable for the professional biologist. First, the quality of the writing is just magnificent. Let me read you a passage that I think is one of the best. He’s watching a colony of army ants in Panama. He’s trying to find the queen, but he can’t get to her because she is surrounded by workers that are going to try to kill anybody who tries to get to her. He writes: “I never did glimpse the queen, but somewhere inside that boiling ball she was, the central data bank, the repository of the master DNA of the whole colony. Those gaping soldiers were prepared to die for the queen, not because they loved their mother, not because they had been drilled in the ideals of patriotism, but simply because their brains and their jaws were built by genes stamped from the master die carried in the queen herself. They behaved like brave soldiers, because they had inherited the genes of a long line of ancestral queens whose lives, and whose genes, had been saved by soldiers as brave as themselves.” That’s magnificent prose that tells you exactly what is going on in language which is clearly literary. It teaches you how to write as a scientist. The whole book is filled with passages like that. There’s another one where he is contemplating the seeds dropping by the bank of the river on which his house sits. He writes, “It’s raining DNA,” and from there he goes into his discussion on the dispersion of seeds and why that’s beneficial. So there is the literary aspect. Second, I’ve always thought of Dawkins as an extremely smart child. He is not a child of course, he’s a really brilliant man. But he looks at things with the eyes of a child, in a way that I don’t think any scientist who wrote really well, including Stephen Jay Gould, ever could. He sees things with this fresh viewpoint that brings them alive. Plus you get a sense of the man. I think that’s another reason he’s such a popular writer. You feel that behind the prose there is a person whom you know, and whom most people like. And I did learn some new things about natural selection from it. Not so much in the principles – which are few and clear to most of us – but from the examples he uses. For example, in chapter two he has an exposition of how bats use sonar to find their prey. It’s really an amazing and engrossing description of a single adaptation, far more complex than a watch – how bats echolocate and all of the things that are involved in it. It’s very complicated and he describes it magnificently. I had no idea about any of that stuff. When you read it, it just impresses you with the amazing perfection this process can come up with. They say scientists are spiritual. I hate to use that word, because of its connotations of religiosity. But the feeling of awe at what this simple process of natural selection can do is something that’s pervasive in Dawkins’s book. Yes, he picks up the old saw of “What use is half an eye?” Again, that’s an intelligent design objection: How can evolution possibly produce a feature which doesn’t work unless all the parts are there simultaneously? And he shows that rudimentary eyes can be built up bit by bit, each one being functional, and each advance representing an adaptive improvement over the form before. Many of the common misconceptions or objections to evolution are dealt with in The Blind Watchmaker , which is another reason why it’s good. It’s implicitly anti-creationist. Another objection he deals with is the idea that evolution cannot make complexity, or build up an increase in the information encoded in organisms’ DNA. He has very good examples dispelling that. He’s a master teacher about this stuff. Even as a professional, you can learn so much from him about how to write, how to teach. You learn the importance of examples, and you get a sense of wonder. Which, after all, is what keeps most of us evolutionists going from day to day."

"I think that is right. I was torn between two of Richard’s books to recommend. The first one is really a classic, and that is The Selfish Gene . The Selfish Gene is an extraordinary book and I always recommend it to people who want to understand the way in which evolution can grapple with the question of self-sacrificing, altruistic behaviour, because many people regard this as a fundamental problem for evolutionary theory. What Richard did brilliantly in The Selfish Gene was to popularise the ideas of WD Hamilton and others, that explain altruistic social behaviours in terms of kin selection. I am not an evolutionary psychologist, but social behaviour is one of the most fascinating things in evolutionary theory, and Richard’s explanations in The Selfish Gene have stood up very well. In the Dawkins book I chose, The Blind Watchmaker , he brilliantly explains how complex mechanisms and structures are put together by the process of evolution. It is true that he makes certain theological points that I don’t agree with. In particular, he equates virtually any belief in God with creationism. Indeed. I certainly think that is an over-simplification and an invalid connection, but that doesn’t detract from the brilliance of the book. One of my favourite examples is a discussion he puts forward on the evolution of the bat’s auditory system. Bats, as I think most people know, are able to fly about in near total darkness because they use a kind of sonar. They have specialised hearing apparatus and use hearing rather than sight to help them navigate. Creationists might wonder, how could evolution ever produce the integrated system of sound production? But as Dawkins explains, pretty much all living beings have some ability to do this, and evolution has built upon those basic capabilities. One of the ways in which I demonstrate this to my students is by having one of them come up on stage, I place a blindfold over their eyes and spin them around two, three times. Then I move the large blackboard very close to them and ask them where the blackboard is while they still have their blindfold on. They are not allowed to touch anything, but simply by using their voice and the reverberations it causes they are easily able to locate the blackboard. Richard’s point is that the rudimentary ability to carry out this function is something that many animals have. What natural selection can do is refine that ability – to make it better and better, and eventually evolve it to perfection."

"Well, this is a man who has become known for banging on about God, who has turned into a stuffy old academic agitator, a bit of a gob, and a vicar without the dog collar. So I wanted to remind everyone that in the 70s, when he wrote The Selfish Gene , he really did something amazing. The Blind Watchmaker refutes some of the criticisms of that first important book and I think it’s also much more accessible and well articulated. It radicalised me. I’d done evolution for biology A-level and I knew it led to life on Earth as we know it, but somehow he, and perhaps he alone, had really understood what Darwin said, and he explains it in a way that is so elegantly powerful that I was an instant convert. He brought Darwin up to date, explaining evolution in a way that incorporates our understanding of genetics and heredity. Essentially, he argues that Darwin was looking at the organism, at the animal or plant and how it responded to the influence of nature, but that we now need to think about the gene. The gene is chemistry – it’s programmed to ensure its own survival. It doesn’t care about you – it’s the selfish gene. He takes evolution one step deeper. It is totally fundamental and shows how the world got there along the way. The power of Richard Dawkins is similar to that of a popularizer of science like Stephen Hawking. Hawking started people thinking about Einstein – it took a century for some people to really understand the enormity of the Einstein’s ideas that completely rule our lives. And most of us, myself included, are still getting to grips with them. I think Dawkins was the first person to really help the rest of us understand evolution. Natural selection, he explains, is at the genetic level. The gene is the unit of natural selection, not the organism. This is a book that I think even some evolutionary biologists read and say; “What I studied was much more interesting than I thought!”"