RICHARD DAWKINS

THE BLIND
WATCHMAKER




ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi in 1941. He was educated at
Oxford University, and after graduation remained there to work
for his doctorate with the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Niko
Tinbergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was an Assistant Professor of
Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1970 he became
a Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford University and a Fellow of New
College. In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

Richard Dawkins's first book. The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition,
1989), became an immediate international bestseller and, like The
Blind Watchmaker, was translated into all the major languages. Its
sequel, The Extended Phenotype, followed in 1982. His other best-
sellers include River Out of Eden (1995) and Climbing Mount
Improbable (1996; Penguin, 1997).

Richard Dawkins won both the Royal Society of Literature Award and
the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize in 1987 for The Blind

The television film of the book, shown in the Horizon
series, won the Sci-Tech Prize for the Best Science Programme of 1987.
He has also won the 1989 Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of
London and the 1990 Royal Society Michael Faraday Award for the
furtherance of the public understanding of science. In 1994 he won
the Nakayama Prize for Human Science and has been awarded an
Honorary D.Litt. by the University of St Andrews and by the
Australian National University, Canberra.


CONTENTS


Preface

Chapter I Explaining the very improbable
Chapter 2 Good design
Chapter 3 Accumulating small change
Chapter 4 Making tracks through animal space
Chapter 5 The power and the archives
Chapter 6 Origins and miracles
Chapter 7 Constructive evolution
Chapter 8 Explosions and spirals
Chapter 9 Puncturing punctuationism
Chapter 10 The one true tree of life
Chapter 11 Doomed rivals

Bibliography

Appendix (1991): Computer programs and 'The
Evolution of Evolvability'

Index


PREFACE


This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once
presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no
longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we
shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet. I wrote
the book because I was surprised that so many people seemed not only
unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of
problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there
was a problem in the first place!

The problem is that of complex design. The computer on which I am
writing these words has an information storage capacity of about 64
kilobytes (one byte is used to hold each character of text). The
computer was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured.
The brain with which you are understanding my words is an array of
some ten million kiloneurones. Many of these billions of nerve cells
have each more than a thousand 'electric wires' connecting them to
other neurones. Moreover, at the molecular genetic level, every single
one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand
times as much precisely-coded digital information as my entire
computer. The complexity of living organisms is matched by the
elegant efficiency of their apparent design. If anyone doesn't agree that
this amount of complex design cries out for an explanation, I give up.
No, on second thoughts I don't give up, because one of my aims in the
book is to convey something of the sheer wonder of biological
complexity to those whose eyes have not been opened to it. But having
built up the mystery, my other main aim is to remove it again by
explaining the solution.


XIV Preface

Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your
reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that
the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it
sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a
dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks
of the advocate's trade. This book is not a dispassionate scientific
treatise. Other books on Darwinism are, and many of them are
excellent and informative and should be read in conjunction with this
one. Far from being dispassionate, it has to be confessed that in parts