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

by Richard Dawkins

When The Blind Watchmaker was first published in the United States, Norton sent me on a brief tour of the country, and I did a number of radio phone-ins. I had been warned to expect hostile questioning from fundamentalist listeners and I confess I was looking forward to destroying their arguments. What actually happened was even better. The listeners who telephoned were genuinely interested in the subject of evolution. They were not hostile to it, they simply did not know anything about it. Instead of destroying arguments, I had the more constructive task of educating the innocent. It took only minutes to awaken them to the power of Darwinism as a convincing explanation of life. I got the impression that the only reason they had not seen its possibilities before was that the subject had been totally omitted from their education.

‘Evolution – The Greatest Show on Earth – The Only Game in Town!’

Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones.

Apparently it is common practice in university debating societies for speakers simply to be told on which side they are to speak. Their own beliefs don’t come into it. I had come a long way to perform the disagreeable task of public speaking, because I believed in the truth of the motion that I had been asked to propose. When I discovered that members of the society were using the motion as a vehicle for playing arguing games, I resolved to decline future invitations from debating societies that encourage insincere advocacy on issues where scientific truth is at stake.

Never forget that, simple as the theory may seem, nobody thought of it until Darwin and Wallace in the mid nineteenth century, nearly 200 years after Newton’s Principia, and more than 2,000 years after Eratosthenes measured the Earth.

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.

Words are our servants, not our masters.

A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. 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.

however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead,

complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance, that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random chance alone.

For those that like ‘-ism’ sorts of names, the aptest name for my approach to understanding how things work is probably ‘hierarchical reductionism’.

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

with the possible exception of some weird deep-sea fish, no animal apart from man uses manufactured light to find its way about.

The noises that they produce are not just slightly too high for humans to hear, like a kind of super dog whistle. In many cases they are vastly higher than the highest note anybody has heard or can imagine. It is fortunate that we can’t hear them, incidentally, for they are immensely powerful and would be deafeningly loud if we could hear them, and impossible to sleep through.

Each successive echo from a bat’s own cries produces a picture of the world that makes sense in terms of the previous picture of the world built up with earlier echoes. If the bat’s brain hears an echo from another bat’s cry, and attempts to incorporate it into the picture of the world that it has previously built up, it will make no sense.

the form that an animal’s subjective experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model. That model will be designed, in evolution, for its suitability for useful internal representation, irrespective of the physical stimuli that come to it from outside. Bats and we need the same kind of internal model for representing the position of objects in three-dimensional space. The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant. That outside information is, in any case, translated into the same kind of nerve impulses on its way to the brain.

Bats may even use the sensations that we call colour for their own purposes, to represent differences in the world out there that have nothing to do with the physics of wavelength, but which play a functional role, for the bat, similar to the role that colours play to us.

(partly because, like many others, he sadly misunderstands natural selection to be ‘random’ and ‘meaningless’).

there is the familiar, and I have to say rather irritating, confusion of natural selection with ‘randomness’. Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

don’t know any monkeys, but fortunately my 11-month old daughter is an experienced randomizing device, and she proved only too eager to step into the role of monkey typist.

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. If, after the aeons, what looks like progress towards some distant goal seems, with hindsight, to have been achieved, this is always an incidental consequence of many generations of short-term selection. The ‘watchmaker’ that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has no long-term goal.

I haven’t written the genetic formulae down, because they wouldn’t mean anything to you, in themselves. That is true of real genes too. Genes only start to mean something when they are translated, via protein synthesis, into growing-rules for a developing embryo.

natural selection doesn’t choose genes directly, it chooses the effects that genes have on bodies, technically called phenotypic effects.

Does the powerlessness of the programmer to control or predict the course of evolution in the computer seem paradoxical?

The actual animals that have ever lived on Earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist. These real animals are the products of a very small number of evolutionary trajectories through genetic space.

the computer can be a powerful friend to the imagination. Like mathematics, it doesn’t only stretch the imagination. It also disciplines and controls it.

We use the word ‘mimicry’ for these cases, not because we think that the animals consciously imitate other things, but because natural selection has favoured those individuals whose bodies were mistaken for other things.

Death doesn’t suddenly arrive below a particular threshold lung area! It becomes gradually more probable as lung area decreases below an optimum (and as it increases above the same optimum, for different reasons connected with economic waste).

Darwin wrote (in The Origin of Species): If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

Stephen Gould, in his excellent essay on The Panda’s Thumb, has made the point that evolution can be more strongly supported by evidence of telling imperfections than by evidence of perfection.

No sensible designer would have conceived such a monstrosity if given a free hand to create a flatfish on a clean drawing board.

The basic rationale is that, if a design is good enough to evolve once, the same design principle is good enough to evolve twice, from different starting points, in different parts of the animal kingdom.

We really don’t know what is special about 13 and 17 years. What matters for our purposes here is that there must be something special about those numbers, because three different species of cicada have independently converged upon them.

India was joined to Africa via Madagascar.

We inherit attributes from a male and a female parent, but each of us is either male or female, not hermaphrodite. Each new baby born has an approximately equal probability of inheriting maleness or femaleness, but any one baby inherits only one of these, and doesn’t combine the two.

Don’t be distracted by the racist assumptions of white superiority. These were as unquestioned in the time of Jenkin and Darwin as our speciesist assumptions of human rights, human dignity, and the sacredness of human life are unquestioned today.

Evolutionary change in a species largely consists of changes in how many copies there are of each of the various possible contents at each addressed DNA location, as the generations pass.

The slowest-evolving molecules, like histones, turn out to be the ones that have been most subject to natural selection. Fibrinopeptides are the fastest-evolving molecules because natural selection almost completely ignores them. They are free to evolve at the mutation rate. The reason this seems paradoxical is that we place so much emphasis on natural selection as the driving force of evolution. If there is no natural selection, therefore, we might expect that there would be no evolution. Conversely, strong ‘selection pressure’, we could be forgiven for thinking, might be expected to lead to rapid evolution. Instead, what we find is that natural selection exerts a braking effect on evolution. The baseline rate of evolution, in the absence of natural selection, is the maximum possible rate. That is synonymous with the mutation rate.

If you fill your factory with machines so sophisticated that they can make anything that any blueprint tells them to make, it is hardly surprising if sooner or later a blueprint arises that tells these machines to make copies of itself.

Replicators that happen to have what it takes to get replicated would come to predominate in the world, no matter how long and indirect the chain of causal links by which they influence their probability of being replicated. And, by the same token, the world will come to be filled with the links in this causal chain. We shall see those links, and marvel at them.

All those calculations about packing the New Testament into the DNA of a single bacterium could be done just as impressively for almost any crystal. What DNA has over normal crystals is a means by which its information can be read.

the idea that natural selection can only destroy, never construct.

In natural selection, genes are always selected for their capacity to flourish in the environment in which they find themselves.

But once one lineage had begun to build up a team of genes for dealing with meat rather than grass, the process was self-reinforcing.

Unfortunately, natural selection doesn’t care about total economies, and it has no room for cartels and agreements.

There has been progress in design, but no progress in accomplishment, specifically because there has been equal progress in design on both sides of the arms race. Indeed, it is precisely because there has been approximately equal progress on both sides that there has been so much progress in the level of sophistication of design. If one side, say the antimissile jamming device, pulled too far ahead in the design race, the other side, the missile in this case, would simply cease to be used and manufactured: it would go ‘extinct’. Far from being paradoxical like Alice’s original example, the Red Queen effect in its arms-race context turns out to be fundamental to the very idea of progressive advancement.

Different people are at liberty to come up with different methods of doing the calculations, but probably the most authoritative index is the ‘encephalization quotient’ or EQ used by Harry Jerison, a leading American authority on brain history.

because the environment of a gene consists, to such a salient degree, of other genes also being selected in the same gene pool, genes will be favoured if they are good at cooperating with other genes in the same gene pool.

‘Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’