The Blind Watchmaker
Categories: Religion & Spirituality, Science & Math
In this 1986 book, Richard Dawkins explains how natural selection, a cumulative and nonrandom process, can produce the complexity of living things. In the eighteenth century, theologian William Paley argued that complex life, like a watch, must have a designer. Dawkins answers that natural selection plays the role of a watchmaker, but a blind one that works without foresight or purpose. He also develops themes from his first book, The Selfish Gene, and responds to its critics.
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- Jeff Bezos
- Charlie Munger
- Sam Harris
- Neil deGrasse Tyson: “This 1986 book is a reminder that the laws of evolution and natural selection, given billions of years, have no trouble generating stupefying complexity among life-forms on Earth.”