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Twenty years after its original publication, The Blind Watchmaker, framed with a new introduction by the author, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte. Natural selection--the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process Darwin discovered--has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker in nature.

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Library Journal Review

Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene ( LJ 12/1/76), persuasively argues the case for Darwinian evolution. He criticizes the prominent punctuationist school, and takes issue with the views of creationists and others who believe that life arose by design of a deity. Using the evolution of various animals as examples and drawing parallels from improvements in modern technology, Dawkins demonstrates the logic of the selection process and of an incremental evolution whose end products are the highly complex, functional organisms we know today. This provocative work is likely to generate further controversy in the scientific community. Recommended for informed laypersons, undergraduates, and scholars. Joseph Hannibal, Cleveland Museum of Natural History (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Oxford zoologist Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype trumpets his thesis in his subtitlealmost guarantee enough that his book will stir controversy. Simply put, he has responded head-on to the argument-by-design most notably made by the 18th century theologian William Paley that the universe, like a watch in its complexity, needed, in effect, a watchmaker to design it. Hewing to Darwin's fundamental (his opponents might say fundamentalist) message, Dawkins sums up: ``The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the evolution of organized complexity.'' Avoiding an arrogant tone despite his up-front convictions, he takes pains to explain carefully, from various sides, why even such esteemed scientists as Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, with their ``punctuated equilibrium'' thesis, are actually gradualists like Darwin himself in their evolutionary views. Dawkins is difficult reading as he describes his computer models of evolutionary possibilities. But, as he draws on his zoological background, emphasizing recent genetic techniques, he can be as engrossing as he is cogent and convincing. His concept of ``taming chance'' by breaking down the ``very improbable into less improbable small components'' is daring neo-Darwinism. Line drawings. (November 24) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Richard Dawkins was educated at Oxford University and taught zoology at the University of California and Oxford University, holding the position of the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He writes about such topics as DNA and genetic engineering, virtual reality, astronomy, and evolution. His books include The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, The God Delusion, and An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist.

(Bowker Author Biography)