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

by Richard Dawkins

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.

Words are our servants, not our masters.

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.

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.

The genes, as we shall see, are more like a recipe than like a blueprint; and a recipe, moreover, that is obeyed not by the developing embryo as a whole, but by each cell or each local cluster of dividing cells. I’m not denying that the embryo, and later the adult, has a large-scale form. But this large-scale form emerges because of lots of little local cellular effects all over the developing body, and these local effects consist primarily of two-way branchings, in the form of two-way cell splittings. It is by influencing these local events that genes ultimately exert influences on the adult body.

Genes in real life do two things. They influence development, and they get passed on to future generations.

Cumulative selection, whether artificial selection as in the computer model or natural selection out there in the real world, is an efficient searching procedure, and its consequences look very like creative intelligence.

Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.

‘What one fool can do, another can’.)

Jumping could theoretically get you the prize faster – in a single hop. But because of the astronomical odds against success, a series of small steps, each one building on the accumulated success of previous steps, is the only feasible way.

the number of different ways of being dead is so much greater than the number of different ways of being alive, the chances are very high that a big random jump in genetic space will end in death. Even a small random jump in genetic space is pretty likely to end in death. But the smaller the jump the less likely death is, and the more likely is it that the jump will result in improvement.

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 vast majority of theoretical trajectories through animal space give rise to impossible monsters.

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.

The claim that ‘The eye either functions as a whole, or not at all’ turns out to be, not merely false but self-evidently false to anybody who thinks for 2 seconds about his own familiar experience.

Herbivores typically have very long guts containing various kinds of fermenting bacteria, since grass is a poor-quality food and needs a lot of digesting. Rather than break their eating up into discrete meals, they typically eat more or less continuously. Huge volumes of plant material flow through them like a river, all the day long.

Both ants and termites live in large colonies consisting mostly of sterile, wingless workers, dedicated to the efficient production of winged reproductive castes which fly off to found new colonies.

Plausible as this argument must have sounded, it is not only an argument against natural selection. It is more an argument against inescapable facts about heredity itself! It manifestly isn’t true that variation disappears as the generations go by. People are not more similar to each other today than they were in their grandparents’ time. Variation is maintained.

The main storage medium inside willow seeds, ants and all other living cells is not electronic but chemical. It exploits the fact that certain kinds of molecule are capable of ‘polymerizing’, that is joining up in long chains of indefinite length. There are lots of different kinds of polymer. For example,

living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA rather than the other way around.

All the mitochondria in you are descended from the small population of mitochondria that travelled from your mother in her egg. Sperms are too small to contain mitochondria, so mitochondria travel exclusively down the female line, and male bodies are dead ends as far as mitochondrial reproduction is concerned.

Most of the properties of an organism that we are equipped to see with our naked eyes are so-called ‘emergent properties’. Even the computer biomorphs, with their nine genes, had emergent properties.

Cumulative selection will see to it that animals are well fitted to outrun their predators or outwit their prey, no less than it sees to it that they are well fitted to the prevailing weather conditions.

Herbivores are enemies of plants, and plants are enemies of herbivores, to the extent that they manufacture thorns, and poisonous or nasty-tasting chemicals.

To summarize the message of this chapter, genes are selected, not for their intrinsic qualities, but by virtue of their interactions with their environments. An especially important component of a gene’s environment is other genes. The general reason why this is such an important component is that other genes also change, as generations go by in evolution.