The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

Dawkins, Richard

ISBN 10: 0393315703 / ISBN 13: 9780393315707

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1996

Seller Inventory # 0393315703-3-21622499

Synopsis:

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

Twenty years after its original publication, The Blind Watchmaker, 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 blind watchmaker in nature.

About the Author: Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and is the author of The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, and many other books.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of ...
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good