The Blind Watchmaker

"Perhaps the best display of expository scientific prose of the twentieth century. It gave me the idea to try my hand at the genre in The Language Instinct."

"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."

"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."

"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!”"