The Blind Watchmaker

The Blind Watchmaker produced in the mid 1980s by Jeremy Taylor and Richard Dawkins for BBC's HORIZON series. It was based on his book of the same name, and won the Sci-Tech Award for Best Science Documentary of the year. Description from the BBC's education catalogue: "...The evidence proposed is well-organized and current. The video first presents creationist ideas, articulated by Texans who support the theory of special creationism, and then provides vivid contradictory data through observation, computer simulations, robotics, experiments and close examination of designs in nature. Its central argument is that the diversity and variety we see in such complex adaptations as the eye and insect mimicry can best be explained by cumulative natural selection over long periods of time. With its vivid blend of argument and scientific detail, The Blind Watchmaker will enrich even the most advanced student's view of evolution." It is acclaimed as the most influential work on evolution written in the last hundred years, "The Blind Watchmaker" offers an inspiring and accessible introduction to one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. A brilliant and controversial book, which demonstrates that evolution by natural selection - the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially non-random process discovered by Darwin - is the only answer to the biggest question of all: why do we exist?

Way back, oh, about 150 years ago a young man took a trip to the Galapagos islands and spent his time there eyeing up the birds on the beach. Nothing unusual there, you may think. Only this man was Darwin and the birds he was �eyeing up� were a number of species of finches whose main distinguishing features were the sizes and shapes of their beaks. After a while mulling over what he saw, Darwin had a bunch of ideas, decided to write a book and the �Origin of Species� was born. The rest, as they say, is history�

Until, that is, Richard Dawkins came along. To give him his full title, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, but he is probably better known as the author of a number of popular science books on genetics and evolution (perhaps his most famous is �The Selfish Gene�). He has won a number of prizes for his writing, including the Royal Society Literature Award and the Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London, and a Horizon documentary programme has been made chronicling his ideas.

So, why the fuss? Put simply, Dawkins took a look at the state of Darwinian theory in the world today and was dismayed at what he saw. Darwin's ideas have been distorted, misrepresented and misunderstood to such an extent that what most people nowadays tend to think of as Darwinian theory is nothing of the kind. Dawkins decided to write a book that would set the record straight and educate a new generation of both general readers and scientific minds.

Dawkins approaches the problem in a systematic manner. The book begins by explaining what Darwinian theory actually is the accumulation of slight genetic changes over many generations and the mechanism of natural selection which ensures that only those changes that are advantageous survive. He then delves deeper to explain how this system works at the genetic level by looking at DNA and the way in which it is handed down through successive generations. This leads to a section where Dawkins postulates a theory on how DNA itself may originally have arisen in the early years of our planet.

Once Darwinian theory has been sufficiently explained, Dawkins turns his attention to the other theories of how life on Earth appeared and deconstructs them one by one in an attempt to show that Darwinism is the only logical theory that manages to explain the creatures and plants we see around us today. He dispels the false beliefs that many people have about what Darwinism is and is not, and shows how alternative theories of evolution such as Lamarckism, mutationism and even creationism can only be false or, at best, incomplete.

Perhaps Dawkins� biggest complaint in the book is the belief many people still hold in creationism, or the idea that some divine being spirited the whole animal and plant kingdom into being in the flash of an eye. He feels that such ideas are nothing more than superstitious mumbo-jumbo and is appalled that the church in America has managed to ban the teaching of Darwinism and evolution in schools in some states because of its �blasphemous� nature. Dawkins� scorn can be heard most clearly when he reminds the reader that �the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status that the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.�

However, rather that just dismiss the theory of creationism, Dawkins is willing to pretend that it is a legitimate scientific theory and submits it to the same fair and impartial criteria that he uses to judge the other theories put forward in the book. He appears open-minded and provides quotations from Bishops and other backers of creationism in an attempt to play devils advocate. Such an appr oach only serves to strengthen Dawkins� case and in the end the reader is easily swayed to his point of view.

This level of impartiality is maintained throughout the book. Although it is always clear on which side of the fence Dawkins own personal convictions lie, he is nevertheless willing to conduct a fair and balanced argument that will enable the reader to make up his or her own mind. Indeed, Dawkins often points out the flaws in his own arguments before the reader has even realised there is a flaw to be found although he always has a clever answer to explain that the flaw isn�t really a flaw at all.

The examples used in the book are all very interesting and Dawkins tries to vary them as much as possible. The one example to which he continues to return is the example of the eye � how could such a complex organ arise through the random mutations of evolution? Whenever a new theory is put forwards the example of the eye is used to test it � if the theory can explain how an eye came to be, it is classed as a good theory; if it is unable to explain, it is a bad theory. The evolution of sonar in bats is the central theme of another chapter, as is the tail feathers of tropical birds, species of �warrior� ants, voles, dolphins and many others.

In another chapter, Dawkins tries to offer an explanation of how DNA came into being in the first place. Instead of rewriting the well known primordial soup example that has been discussed in any number of other books, he champions a controversial theory that DNA arose as the by-product of certain types of inanimate structures (for example, clay on river beds). Although he does not claim that this is the one true theory, Dawkins says that it is interesting and worthy of further investigation by evolutionary scientists. By introducing such a new idea into the book, the author encourages the reader to think in new ways and, for me, this was one of the most interesting chapters.

Another interesting section of the book is when Dawkins describes the �biomorphs� that he created on his home computer. When looking into the ways in which creatures evolve, he decided to write a simple computer program to create a tree diagram with nine genes, which dictated how the diagram should grow new branches. The first time he actually ran the program, Dawkins was astonished to find that the shapes he was able to create were very similar to the shapes of insects in the real world. By acting as a human version of natural selection, he was able to decide which biomorphs would survive to create a new generation and so shape the �evolution� of an imaginary species. The program has now been developed a stage further and in an appendix he writes that it is available for PC and Apple Mac.

If there was one criticism I had to make about the book, it would be that it is sometimes aimed a little too much at others in the scientific community. That is not to say that it is difficult to read � the writing style is simple and the language used can be easily understood even by a total non-scientist such as myself. What I mean is that Dawkins uses the book to address a number of issues that are currently being contested in the field of evolutionary genetics. One chapter, for example, concentrates solely on discussing �punctuationism� � a theory stating that evolution occurs in rapid spurts between long periods of stasis. Although the discussion is relevant to the book, Dawkins spends most of the chapter pointing out why his theory is right and those of his contemporaries are flawed, if not wrong entirely. There is a general impression that he is letting off steam, and that the arguments he is advancing would be better off in a journal devoted to evolution where they could be read by the scientific community at large. At least Dawkins is willing to admit th at ��some of these arguments, however hotly they rage today, will seem terribly dated in decades to come�.

On the whole, though, this is a very interesting book and one I would recommend to anyone with a passing interest in evolution or science in general. Dawkins makes the point that Darwinism suffers from a fate worse than other branches of science. Just because we don�t know much about or don�t understand Einstein�s theories of general and special relativity, it doesn�t mean that we disagree with them or dismiss them out of hand. Yet, many people who do not know very much about Darwinism are willing to dismiss it as nonsense and support a supernatural belief that life was created by some divine being. My advice to someone like that would be to read this book from cover to cover and then come back and see if they still held the same beliefs. I am willing to bet that they will have changed their mind.

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