A Review of the Blind Watchmaker

Book Report I:

A Review of Richard Dawkins’, The Blind Watchmaker

It seems that well-renowned biologist Richard Dawkins has a pretty big evolutionary bone to pick, and he does so zealously in his entertaining and highly informative work, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. The title of the book itself is a reference to Reverand William Paley who famously argued in the early 1800’s, that if one were to by chance find a watch (which undoubtedly was a remarkably high-tech device at the time) even without knowing what it was, upon examining it’s intricacies, one could not doubt that it took the effort of a skilled and intelligent designer(s) to create it, and by the same analogy, the complexity of any living being necessitates the existence of a master “designer” to have created it, ergo God. Dawkins argues that while Paley’s explanation is emotionally appealing, it is dead wrong—as is any and all other rationalizations that advance this essentially teleological argument of “intelligent design”.

Dawkins begins his discussion by carefully considering another of Paley’s primary pieces of “evidence”, the human eye, an amazing device even more complex that the best telescope. Dawkins replies, “The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics..” (5). Specifically, the author is referring to the manifestation of these forces through the physical mechanism of natural selection, the driving force behind Darwin’s theory of evolution. He then proceeds to deconstruct this “illusion of design and planning” (21), by first, describing the merits of “hierarchal reductionism”, which allows one to understand how a seemingly very improbable thing or event could be broken down into a series of less complex explanations. This is a clever setup as it lays the foundation for explaining the...