The Blind Watchmaker

On my reading list but anything by the grand master of physics is a 5 star rating by me.

Best and most Understandable scientific explanations, Extraordinary Science facts and the perfect way to improve ones knowledge.

Highly recommend

Some days ago I received the book and, to be honest, I have never ordered used books on Amazon before. So to say, I was prepared for the worst outcome :) Turned out that the book was in excellent condition. I am pleasantly surprised and will definitely order next book the same way to save some money. ☀️

Comprei pra dar de presente ao meu marido. Ele gostou muito, já estava interessado nesse livro a um bom tempo.

Extremely interesting.

This book is about evolution: it is described as a very large amount of steps of very small improvements. Richard goes into great detail to help us understand how it works. I enjoyed reading it as it takes theory a step further and I regret having not read this book years earlier. Richard follows logic if we accept A then it means the following. He also explores the opposite if A isn't true. He (and Darwin) logically rejects evolution as having anything to do with divine intervention because if that is needed to explain any steps in evolution it means the theory is false.He makes the reader understand that this process is so complex and played at multiple levels - from genes and cells, to species to planetary conditions - and over a time scale that the human mind cannot comprehend. It may seem magical or divine but it really isn't. When reading the chapters about this I had to think about a conversation at the start of Deep Space Nine about time: "What comes before now is not different than what is now or what is to come. It is one's existence". If we were to meet such a being we would not understand this with our human mind. For a human a decade is quite long, on geological time scale 60,000 years is an instant. We look at the animals and plants today and we should realize they are all the outcome of a billion years long evolutionary process.The fossil record is extremely limited, so we miss many steps and sometimes we aren't even looking in the right area. In Dawkins' view life does not have a meaning - 42 might be the right answer after all. It's interesting as recently I learned about another theory that looked at life as a way to recirculate nutrition - each animal and plant is part of a system. Dawkins would reject that and the system is there because of life. He spent the last chapter debunking 'alternative theories'. In a way it's quite academic but it does show clearly where Richard stands.Unfortunately he does not know how life started and he postulates some theories that sound the same as how we explain the universe using terms like dark energy and dark matter - it could be true but for now it's not more than an educated guess. I understand that this is still one of the large mysteries of life. As the book was written a few decades ago, some of the examples that Richard uses sounds dated - it does not take anything away from his message, but I can see my daughter for example not being able to understand what he means with a laser disc or a DC-8. If you are religious and have an open mind I would recommend reading it - Dawkins is not against religion in a way that he condemns religious people, it's more that it is not the right explanation for how life is today. There is no Watchmaker at work.

Arguably Dawkins best book, 'The Blind Watchmaker' is exactly what the doctor ordered for the American religious fundamentalist epidemic that has plagued its society with dogmatically closed-minded, kindergarten-level refutations of evolution for too long. Unfortunately, this book is needed as much as ever over 30 years after it was written, and the reason for that has been shown to me over and over again in my personal life: the people who need most to understand the content of this book never read more than a few pages before giving up. That said, the well-articulated and technical descriptions are well worth the investment of concentration that the book asks of you.