The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design View on Amazon

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design - Richard Dawkins

Charles Darwin’s phenomenal discovery may have challenged creationist arguments but only Richard Dawkins could have put it all into words. Twenty years after it was first published, Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker is framed with a new introduction so that it is more prescient and relevant today.

In a book titled Natural Theology, 18th-century theologian William Paley argued just like a watch is far too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, all living things with their great complexities have been purposefully designed as well. Paley tabled this idea fifty years before Darwin published his On the Origin of Species.

In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins dismisses the idea that complexity cannot stem without the intervention of a creator, by using the example of the eye. He begins with a simple organism that is only capable of distinguishing between darkness and light in a very crude manner and then takes the reader through a series of simple modifications that eventually lead to the evolution of a sophisticated design as elegant and complex as the mammalian eye. Through the course of this journey, Dawkins points to different creatures to establish how their seeing apparatuses are all useful though each may have its own level of complexity.

In the preface of the book, Dawkins explains how he wrote the book not only to persuade readers about the Darwinian world-view being true but also to assert that Darwin’s idea is perhaps the only known theory that can possibly solve the mystery of man’s current existence.