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

by Richard Dawkins

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

A small amount of order has come out of disorder, and no mind planned it.

It happens that the break-up of the great southern continent of Gondwanaland began during the age of the dinosaurs. When South America and Australia broke away to begin their long periods of isolation from the rest of the world, they each carried their own cargo of dinosaurs, and also of the less-prominent animals that were to become the ancestors of modern mammals. When, rather later, for reasons that are not understood and are the subject of much profitable speculation, the dinosaurs (with the exception of the group of dinosaurs that we now call birds) went extinct, they went extinct all over the world.

If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

Truisms like ‘the world is full of things that have what it takes to be in the world’ are trivial, almost silly, until we come to apply them to a special kind of durability, durability in the form of lineages of multiple copies. DNA messages have a different kind of durability from that of rocks, and a different kind of generatability from that of dewdrops. For DNA molecules, ‘what it takes to be in the world’ comes to have a meaning that is anything but obvious and tautological. ‘What it takes to be in the world’ turns out to include the ability to build machines like you and me, the most complicated things in the known universe.

property of self-replication. This is the basic ingredient of cumulative selection.

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.

So, cumulative selection can manufacture complexity while single-step selection cannot. But cumulative selection cannot work unless there is some minimal machinery of replication and replicator power, and the only machinery of replication that we know seems too complicated to have come into existence by means of anything less than many generations of cumulative selection! Some people see this as a fundamental flaw in the whole theory of the blind watchmaker. They see it as the ultimate proof that there must originally have been a designer, not a blind watchmaker but a far-sighted supernatural watchmaker. Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control the day-to-day succession of evolutionary events; maybe he did not frame the tiger and the lamb, maybe he did not make a tree, but he did set up the original machinery of replication and replicator power, the original machinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection, and hence all of evolution, possible.

Could it be that one far-off day intelligent computers will speculate about their own lost origins? Will one of them tumble to the heretical truth, that they have sprung from a remote, earlier form of life, rooted in organic, carbon chemistry, rather than the silicon-based electronic principles of their own bodies?

Will he rediscover some electronic equivalent of the metaphor of the arch, and realize that computers could not have sprung spontaneously into existence but must have originated from some earlier process of cumulative selection? Will he go into detail and reconstruct DNA as a plausible early replicator, victim of electronic usurpation? And will he be far-sighted enough to guess that even DNA may itself have been a usurper of yet more remote and primitive replicators, crystals of inorganic silicates? If he is of a poetic turn of mind, will he even see a kind of justice in the eventual return to silicon-based life, with DNA no more than an interlude, albeit one that lasted longer than three aeons?

Improvement in equipment feeds on itself. This is a recipe for explosive, runaway evolution.

The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life, while the fox is only running for his dinner.

An individual body is a large vehicle or ‘survival machine’ built by a gene cooperative, for the preservation of copies of each member of that cooperative.

When selected genes in one species provide the environment in which genes in another species are selected, the result is often an evolutionary arms race.

The human mind is an inveterate analogizer. We are compulsively drawn to see meaning in slight similarities between very different processes.

Female preference is a manifestation of the female nervous system. The female nervous system develops under the influence of her genes, and its attributes are therefore likely to have been influenced by selection over past generations. Where others had thought of male ornaments evolving under the influence of static female preference, Fisher thought in terms of female preference evolving dynamically in step with male ornament.

The important point is that if we consider mutations of ever-increasing magnitude, there will come a point when, the larger the mutation is, the less likely it is to be beneficial; while if we consider mutations of ever-decreasing magnitude, there will come a point when the chance of a mutation’s being beneficial is 50 per cent.

Nevertheless, the fact that, whenever we try selective breeding, we encounter no initial resistance to it, suggests to me that, if lineages go for many generations in the wild without changing, this is not because they resist change but because there is no natural selection pressure in favour of changing. They don’t change because individuals that stay the same survive better than individuals that change.

Embryonic development is a process. It is an orderly sequence of events, like the procedure for making a cake, except that there are millions more steps in the process and different steps are going on simultaneously in many different parts of the ‘dish’.

the effect, if any, that a gene has is not a simple property of the gene itself, but is a property of the gene in interaction with the recent history of its local surroundings in the embryo.

Mutation is non-random in the sense that it can only make alterations to existing processes of embryonic development. It cannot conjure, out of thin air, any conceivable change that selection might favour. The variation that is available for selection is constrained by the processes of embryology, as they actually exist.

Mutation is random with respect to adaptive advantage, although it is non-random in all sorts of other respects. It is selection, and only selection, that directs evolution in directions that are non-random with respect to advantage. Mutationism is not just wrong in fact. It never could have been right. It is not in principle capable of explaining the evolution of improvement. Mutationism belongs with Lamarckism, not as a disproved rival to Darwinism but as no rival at all.