Blind Watchmaker -

Richard Dawkins

Penguin Books

2006

368 páginas

12h 16m

ISBN-10: 0141026162

Oxford zoologist Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype trumpets his thesis in his subtitlealmost guarantee enough that his book will stir controversy. Simply put, he has responded head-on to the argument-by-design most notably made by the 18th century theologian William Paley that the universe, like a watch in its complexity, needed, in effect, a watchmaker to design it. Hewing to Darwin's fundamental (his opponents might say fundamentalist) message, Dawkins sums up: "The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the evolution of organized complexity." Avoiding an arrogant tone despite his up-front convictions, he takes pains to explain carefully, from various sides, why even such esteemed scientists as Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, with their "punctuated equilibrium" thesis, are actually gradualists like Darwin himself in their evolutionary views. Dawkins is difficult reading as he describes his computer models of evolutionary possibilities. But, as he draws on his zoological background, emphasizing recent genetic techniques, he can be as engrossing as he is cogent and convincing. His concept of "taming chance" by breaking down the "very improbable into less improbable small components" is daring neo-Darwinism. Line drawings.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

The antithesis of chance

You may throw every structure of a watch together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and the chance of it becoming a perfectly functioning would be so remote that it could only be explained as craftsmanship. What about human beings? How could such a “simple matter” emerge from a bath of neurotransmitters inside the strangeness of quanta and acquire an integrated system that is able to think, calculate and move with precision? This couldn’t happen by chance, right?
Random forces in William Paley words: cannot explain how all these beautiful springs and gears came together to tell time. Nor can they explain the organs of living things. No purposeless process could ever such intricate detail and no blind leap of chance could ever construct such complex machinery. Just as watches requires the existence of a Watchmaker, so nature requires the existence of an omnipotent designer...That seems like a very good explanation, right?
Professor and Dr. Richard Dawkins is one-of-a-kind ethologist and biologist responsible for passing along, refining and breaking paradigms of the evolutionary system. Ascending one order of magnitude from reductionism, we have what we understand as “living creatures”. Such creatures, as science explains, arise from a very long excruciating process regimented by a selective process which punishes the indulgent and passes along the eternal gene.
Picture this: With a population of certain animals which has many different configurations, some percentage of animals may be eaten less often. A simple differential edge of survival from animals who can blend, say, with the environment is enough to propel evolution and to turn the majority of the population into something entirely new. Then, this propulsive force of selection carries on the differential survival all the way up, until we come to the point that 99% of animals have, for example, the same colors as leafs, which are better for hiding.
As expected for any book written by Professor Dawkins, he goes even further by questioning what really is beneath sheer luck, miracles, major improbabilities and fantastic coincidences. The main thesis is focused on breaking the events into a cumulative series of small chance events like the waiting period for random thermal jostling of atoms to generate a self-replicating molecule, the errors in high-fidelity copying genes, the classification of cells to produce large different bodies, the conditions tracking the environment, the impossibility of an absolute taxonomy, and so on.
Suddenly, the watchmaker in Mr. Paley’s analogy becomes blind and chance becomes a minor ingredient in the recipe. Our framework thanks to many like Darwin and Professor Dawkins, can now fathom the cumulative selection timescales, can imagine internal models using visual and sound information in very different ways from ours, like the echolocation of bats, and can even recognize that our fine chiseled large body equipped with fine networks, is equally an impressive accomplishment, but far from perfection.
This is a very important work written by the “polemic”, Mr. Dawkins. I feel very honored to live in the same era as him and I admire his courage to fight, with pure logical reason and for so many decades, the dogmas (Which are still very strong to this day). The cherries on top of this work to sustain arguments and break some fallacies makes the book relatively extensive, but it definitely corroborates to the full and right scope about ethology, biology and natural selection.

Link to my highlights: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19Iz3hhzCc5uhbhBogemWg7eM2m4Kwdmh/view?usp=sharing