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

Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi in 1941. He was educated at Oxford University, and after graduation remained there to work for his doctorate with the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was an Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1970 he became a Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College. In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

Richard Dawkinss first book, The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition, 1989), became an immediate international bestseller and was translated into all the major languages. Its sequel, The Extended Phenotype, followed in 1982. His other bestsellers include The Blind Watchmaker (1986; Penguin, 1988), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996; Penguin, 1997), Unweaving the Rainbow (Penguin, 1999) and The Ancestors Tale (2004).

Richard Dawkins won both the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize in 1987 for The Blind Watchmaker. The television film of the book, shown in the Horizon series, won the Sci-Tech Prize for the Best Science Programme of 1987. He has also won the 1989 Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the 1990 Royal Society Michael Faraday Award for the furtherance of the public understanding of science. In 1994 he won the Nakayama Prize for Human Science and in 1995 was awarded an Honorary D.Litt. by the University of St Andrews and by the National University, Canberra. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and won the Cosmos International Prize.

To my parents

PENGUIN BOOKS

The most brilliant contemporary preacher of Charles Darwins theory of evolution Dawkins has done it again and defended modern Darwinist orthodoxy with wit and passion

Daily Telegraph

A lovely book, original and lively, it expounds the ins and outs of evolution with enthusiastic clarity, answering, at every point, the cavemen of creationism

Isaac Asimov

It succeeds quite brilliantly. Most particularly, again and again, it brings home the nature and force of the central evolutionary mechanism of natural selction in a way that I have never seen or felt previously. The closest analogy I can think of is Galileos Dialogues which made reasonable the Copernican Revolution, and I hope I will not be thought to be pushing things to an embarrassing point if I say that Dawkins book can be compared to Galileos, not only in type but in standard

Professor Michael Ruse

He disposes of the arguments for God the Designer without diminishing our sense of the mystery and complexity of our world indeed he increases our sense of wonder. Dawkinss speculative attempts to account for human self-consciousness and our interest in our own doings are ingenious and daring

A. G. Cairns-Smith, Independent

I admired Richard Dawkinss The Blind Watchmaker or Son of Selfish Gene: enough to say that it shares the grave wit and thrilling godlessness of the earlier book

Martin Amis, Book of the Year, Observer

A full-throated defence of orthodox neo-Darwinism He robustly sees off creationists on the right and the spectrum of critics of his version of orthodoxy on the left There is much which is good and not merely clever about this book

Steven Rose, New Statesman

One great virtue of this book is to demonstrate the incompatibility of Darwinism and theism. The author points out the inconsistency of these sophisticated theologians who wish to appear in step with modern science, while at the same time retaining a corner for God in their cosmogony

Churchman

Brilliant exposition, tightly argued but kept readable by plentiful recourse to analogies and examples The Blind Watchmaker shows what a convincing scientific argument looks like; it is popular science at its best. An invigorating minor theme is provided by the sideswipes that Dawkins hands out to creationists, erring colleagues, misguided interlopers from other sciences, and the media that gleefully misreport their muddleheaded musings. Highly recommended

The Times

An astonishingly lucid exposition of Darwinism Dawkins is a born writer with an unmatched gift for the brilliant metaphor, the inspired syntactic switch, and the relevant zoological detail. The Blind Watchmaker is entertaining as well as engrossing: Dawkinss most wonderful book

Francisco J. Ayala, Professor of Genetics,
University of California

For those who like good writing, tight argument and unpulled punches, this is a satisfying book. One by one, the author takes the arguments of Darwins critics and drives a juggernaut of logic through them

Economist