Synopsis
Despite the theory’s age, The Blind Watchmaker is as prescient and timely 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. “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
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About the Authors
Richard Dawkins taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. Among his previous books are The Ancestor's Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devil's Chaplain. Dawkins lives in Oxford with his wife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward.
Although best-known as an actress, Lalla has always been an artist and her versatility seems boundless. She has illustrated books of comic verse, written her own comic verse, and more recently created a new series of textile paintings exhibited in 2010 at the National Theatre in London. Her new National Theatre exhibition open in September 2011.
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