I finished The Blind Watchmaker recently. Stunning book.
Edit: Found a recent review which does it more justice than I can.
Richard Dawkins' watchmaker still has the power to open our eyesOne sometimes forgets, given his recent combative secular humanism, just how warm and lyrical Richard Dawkins can be. This is a patient, often beautiful book from 1986 that begins in a generous mood and sustains its generosity to the end. It takes its title from a famous sentence in William Paley's Natural Theology (1802), which Dawkins calls "a book that I greatly admire..."
Not only does he profess admiration, he even concedes that he might once have been convinced by Paley. "I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin's Origin of Species was published," he volunteers.
This generosity extends even to the "sincere and honest", but clearly somewhat confused, Church of England bishop Hugh Montefiore who could not believe (Dawkins calls this the Argument from Personal Incredulity) that natural selection explained, for instance, the whiteness of polar bears.
But most of all, Dawkins' generosity extends to the reader, who is confronted with meticulous reasoning, leavened by lyrical riffs upon metaphor that have always been his trademark.
Dawkins can hardly have been the first to propose the idea of "genetic space" in which "the actual animals that have ever lived are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist", but I cannot think of anybody else who would then go on to propose notional genetic engineers who could "move from any point in animal space to any other point" and then concede that, sadly, we might never know enough to navigate towards the "dear dead creatures" the dodo, T. rex and the trilobites, lurking forever "in their private corners of that huge genetic hypervolume".
This passage grows out of his seemingly artless excitement at an experiment he was running on a 64-kilobyte computer (yes, this book was written in the silicon palaeolithic). His simple evolutionary modelling program had, in 29 generations, started to provide two-dimensional biomorphs that looked like bats, spiders, scorpions, tree frogs and even a fox. The insects had eight rather than six legs but "even so! I still cannot conceal from you my feeling of exultation as I first watched these exquisite creatures emerging before my eyes."
All the way through the book, he seizes happy analogies, bright metaphors and shining images to light up his passion and our darkness: just as he makes his biomorphs seem alive, so he has a way of making living things seem transcendent. Soldier ants in Panama, for instance, guarding the ant queen, also guarded "the master copies of the very instructions that made them do the guarding. They were guarding the wisdom of their ancestors, the Ark of the Covenant."
He is of course, about to address the idea of DNA, and he casually introduces DNA molecules as "dewdrops" that form only to evaporate, an existence measured in moments, whereas the instructions locked in DNA "are as durable as the hardest rocks", with lifespans to be measured on a geological timescale.
If this book consisted only of bright ideas and beautiful language, however, we wouldn't be reading it now. It endures in print because it must be one of the best books ever to address, patiently and persuasively, the question that has baffled bishops and disconcerted dissenters alike: how did nature achieve its astonishing complexity and variety?
Dawkins dismisses the "what use is half an eye?" question with such grace and assuredness that I cannot understand why it is still being asked, in various forms. He addresses all those issues of improbability (how did self-replicating molecules emerge, how did life begin, why did it begin on Earth and apparently only on Earth?) not by answering the questions but by patiently explaining what improbability really means, given a starting point of energy and organic chemistry, on a timescale of billions of years and with 100 trillion planets to choose from.
The point of every chapter – every page in fact – is to convince the reader that what we see now, buzzing, flapping or scuttling around us everywhere, is the consequence of the operation of natural selection upon random mutations over an immense period of time. To understand this is not to explain how life started, or why the first fish crawled on to dry land, or why birds learned to swim under water, or why humans have enough intelligence to ask questions about an unknowable prehistory. To understand this is to realise that, whatever the puzzle set by the appearance of design in living things, it is most easily explicable in terms of Darwin's huge, all-embracing idea, and the enormous time available since the first organisms began to drift on the warm pre-Cambrian tides.
In the course of this very substantial and always meticulously sustained argument, Dawkins writes things that one feels he might not choose to write now, on punctuated equilibrium, cladism and other clashes of heresy and orthodoxy, doctrine and ritual within the broad church of evolutionary argument. But one can read even these with profit.
Almost everything about this book – the instances, the writing, the passion, the lyrical imagery – confirms again and again that there is nothing dry about science, nothing heartless about research, and nothing unfeeling about the way a biologist looks at an animal.
My copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has four entries from Charles Darwin (which shows how concise it must be) and two quotations from Dawkins: both of them from this book, and one of them from the passage that gives this book its title.
"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker"
