The Blind Watchmaker

Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 

In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins turns his attention briefly to the bombardier beetle. First he cites a passage from The Neck of the Giraffe, a book by science writer Francis Hitching, that describes the bombardier beetle s defensive system, as part of an argument against Darwinism ... 

Paley expresses the design argument so well that he even earns the respect of dedicated evolutionists. Richard Dawkins s The Blind Watchmaker takes its title from Paley s watch analogy but claims that evolution, rather than an intelligent agent, plays the role of the watchmaker ... 

The fact that the mutation-selection process has two parts. .. is brought vividly by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker. Imagine a device that is something like a combination lock. It is composed of a series of disks placed side by side. On the edge of each disk, the twenty-six letters of the alphabet appear. The disks can be spun separately so that different sequences of letters may appear in the viewing window. 

In The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins tells his readers that even if a statue of the Virgin Mary waved to them, they should not conclude they had witnessed a miracle.9 Perhaps all the atoms of the statue s arm just happened to move in the same direction at once—a low-probability event to be sure, but possible. Most people who saw a statue come to life would... 

Anthonsen HW, Baptista A, Drablos F, Martel P, Petersen SB (1994) The blind watchmaker and rational protein engineering, J Biotechnol, 36 185-220... 

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton Company, New York. 1986. 

You may be familiar with Richard Dawkins s books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, and may perhaps have learned most of what you know about evolution, particularly the evolution of behavior, from these excellent sources. His second book. The Extended Phenotype, is less well known, and that is a pity, because in many ways it is his finest achievement. Nonetheless, even the most lucid books contain some obscure passages, and you could weU have been puzzled by a couple of pages of The Extended Phenotype that deal will the theory of modifier genes, which R. A. Fisher proposed in 1930 to explain why the phenotypes of some genes are dominant whereas others are recessive, phenotype being a technical term for the specific set of observable characteristics that indicate the presence of a particular variant of a gene. 

Richard Dawkins (1990) The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, London. 

The way out of this dilemma is to recognize the power of cumulative selection. Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, asked how long it would take a monkey poking randomly at a typewriter to reproduce Hamlet s remark to Polonius, Methinks it is like a weasel (Figure 3.58). An astronomically large number of keystrokes, of the order of 10 °, would be required. However, suppose that we preserved each correct character and... 

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