num_pages: 468
description: "The best general account of evolution I have read in recent years."―E. O. Wilson. With a new introduction. Twenty years after its original publication, The Blind Watchmaker , framed with a new introduction by the author, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin’s brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte. Natural selection―the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process Darwin discovered―has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker in nature.
language: English
title: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
titlecomplete: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
genres: Audiobook, Biology, Genetics, Religion, Philosophy, Science, Atheism, Evolution, Nonfiction, Popular Science
ratings_count: 38918
awards: awardedAt: 536486400000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Current Interest, awardedAt: 504950400000
name: W.H. Heinemann Award
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company