Blind Watchmaker Why The Evidence Of Evolution Reveals A Universe Without Design

Twenty years after its original publication, , 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 watchmaker in nature.

"Dawkins has done more than anyone else now writing to make evolutionary biology comprehensible and acceptable to a general audience." John Maynard Smith

"As readable and vigorous a defense of Darwinism as has been published since 1859." The Economist

"The best general account of evolution I have read in recent years."--E. O. Wilson. With a new introduction.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 321-326) and index.

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and is the author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Devil's Chaplain, and The Ancestor's Tale.