Upload to Google Docs

The Blind Watchmaker

By Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer. The Blind Watchmaker contains a sustained critique of the argument from design, an important creationist argument. In the book, Dawkins argues against the watchmaker analogy made famous by the eighteenth-century English theologian William Paley via his book Natural Theology, in which Paley argues that just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence merely by accident, so too must all living things—with their far greater complexity—be purposefully designed. Dawkins shares the view generally held by scientists that natural selection is sufficient to explain the apparent functionality and non-random complexity of the biological world and can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, albeit as an automatic, unguided by any designer, nonintelligent, blind watchmaker.  Dawkins also believes in cumulative selection as the key to our modern explanations of life. “It strings together a series of acceptably lucky events (random mutations) together in a nonrandom sequence so that, at the end of the sequence, the finished product carries the illusion of being very, very lucky indeed, far too improbable to have come about by chance alone.”  He brings this out throughout the book by comparing things we have manufactured like sonar and computers, to bats, whales and the human brain.

Question 1. Who made the Watchmaker analogy famous?

Question 2. What is Cumulative Selection?

Question 3. What does Dawkins feel is sufficient?