In a Pennsylvania supreme court case (where someone wants the school district to teach intelligent design as an alternative theory to students "to broaden their mind"), an expert witness articulated a subtle but important distinction between every day use and scientific use of the word "theory". In everyday use, theory (as in conspiracy theory) often means belief. I often have to explain to grad students that beliefs are separated into "conjectures" (any random beliefs); "hypotheses" (beliefs that can be tested against experimental observations); and theories/laws (beliefs that are so well tested and not a single credible counter-example has been found, so we'll do well to take them as truth until they are overthrown by a better theory). A hypothesis that is disproven, btw, is just garbage now.

Those who want the school district to teach "intelligent design" argues Darwinian evolution is "just a theory" -- they are right about that, but they are using theory in the scientific sense (as in truth). With that definition, intelligent design is pure conjecture, not even a hypothesis (and in some sense more useless than garbage).

Most people do not appreciate that the theory of Darwinian evolution is a very robust scientific theory. Dawkins wrote countless books to educate us. This book is one of them. The title is a reference to the seemingly good argument of Paley that if I see a watch on the ground, I infer there is a watch maker that made the watch. This is all good and well, but the real question is when I see a watch maker, do I infer a watchmaker maker. If you answer yes, then why stop there: who made the watchmaker-maker. The point is, invoking God is not settling the matter, but merely swept the complexity underneath the vague notion of a deity. And evolution is a perfectly good answer -- which over ~200 years has not only held up, but actually strengthened as scientists understood genetics. Evolution is a very long process that is hard to fully grasp, leading to many objectionable caricatures of the theory. What is objectionable are the caricatures themselves. The author went through 11 chapters covering a rather comprehensive array of misunderstanding, caricatures, and downright misleading propaganda (from the creationists).

One caricature is that nature inventing eye in one step (or two) is incredible -- how can "half of an eye" be any useful? The reality is changes are much more gradual and having any light sensitivity is better than none, granting survival advantage.

Another is how can randomness create wonderful designs such as eyes. The answer is that mutations are random, evolution is decidedly not.

Another one is natural selection is a negative force, weeding out failures, how can it be a positive, constructive force. This is not very different from sculpturing, which is a negative process resulting in positive result (complexity).

There are also subtler issues. For instance, when punctuationists came along, they wanted to emphasize a subtle point of their insight and claimed that maybe the jump in fossil record is not because the record is incomplete but rather the very process of evolution itself is "rapid changes punctuated by long-term stasis" (hence "punctuationists"). Even this is misleading. The abrupt change in fossil record is not documenting an event of evolution as much as an event of migration.

The list goes on and on. In addition to deepening the understanding of the subject, reading Dawkins is a delight. He is a very lucid writer. He explains things with precision language that is also easy to the understand. He uses analogies and consistently tells you when the analogy breaks down. Even if you don't care about evolution, the writing itself is worth browsing.

Two summers ago, I did myself the favor of reading The Selfish Gene. Well, I didn’t quite read it; rather, I listened to Dawkins and his wife, Lalla Ward, narrate the book, as I took long walks in the forest near my house. Incidentally, I think Dawkins (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Lalla) has a magnificent voice; it’s a pleasure to hear him speak.
tt
But that’s a matter of taste; what is not a matter of taste is the quality of that book. Agree or disagree with Dawkins, one must admit that The Selfish Gene is a book of the finest quality. Indeed, I must say that I wasn’t quite prepared for how good it was. I was expecting an entertaining book of popular science; what I got was an eloquent, subtle, and powerful book which managed, in a just a couple weeks of long walks, to completely transform my understanding of animal behavior.
tt
This book, The Blind Watchmaker—also listened to in a few long walks—is not of the same caliber. But it is quite good. (Well, if it were written by almost anybody except Dawkins himself, I would say it was very good—but I know the heights he can reach.) I know close to nothing about his advocacy of atheism, and frankly I don’t much care, but I think the public has a rare treasure in Dawkins; what other popular biology writer can compare?
tt
Dawkins is, to an almost remarkable extent, as much a philosopher as a scientist. This book, as well as his first, is jammed full of thought experiments; Dawkins simply can’t get enough of them. This emphasis on philosophical argumentation allows him, so to speak, to take the reader inside the logic of Darwinism (as well as inside the fuzzy logic of Darwinism’s opponents). He doesn’t simply tell the reader things biologists think—like a reporter sending dispatches from the front lines—but tries to get the layreader to understand exactly why biologists think what they do. As a result, his books can actually be a bit dense and exhausting; but the patient reader is amply rewarded with a deepened understanding.
tt
The main reason that this book wasn’t as enjoyable as his first was that Dawkins spends an awful lot of time dealing with contemporary controversies. This was, I believe, a time of the famed ‘Darwin Wars’, when Gould and his followers had highly publicized debates with team Dawkins. Apparently, reporters were very eager to report anything even slightly critical of Darwinian theory—whether it be from taxonomists, paleontologists, or priests—so Dawkins was forced to spend a lot of time on material that, to today’s reader, may be of limited interest. For example, Dawkins becomes almost pedantic in his chapter on punctuated equilibrium, as he argues again and again that Gould is not a ‘true’ saltationist, but only a modified gradualist. Having read Gould, I was personally interested in this; but I would understand if others were not.
tt
Perhaps I was not the book’s target audience, as I needed no convincing that Darwinian evolution is both a well-supported and a powerful theory. Nonetheless, Dawkins did manage to clear up some of evolution’s finer point for me. I was particularly excited when (not to take too much credit) Dawkins confirmed a suspicion that I had expressed a few years back, when I was learning about human evolution. I was actually in Kenya, studying with the Leakeys, who—being the Leakeys—had plastic casts of several dozen important hominin fossils in their lab. As my anatomy teacher enjoyed pointing out, the vast majority of hominin fossils for any given species can fit inside a shoebox. Most of the fossils are distorted, broken, or otherwise fragmentary. Yet from these scant remains, paleoanthropologists expend tremendous energy arguing about the hominin family tree. Is this skull cap Homo erectus or Homo habilis? Is this thigh bone from an early homo or a late autralopithecus?
tt
Somewhat exasperated by all this ambiguity—about what appeared to me to be a matter of words—I got an idea: what if the idea of ‘species’ itself breaks down in an evolutionary timescale? After all, if we believe that species change via gradual selection one to another, it follows that there must be individuals intermediate between any two given hominin species, and, furthermore, individuals intermediate between the intermediates—and so on. Eureka! Well, it turns out Dawkins (as well as many other, probably) had the very same idea long before; it appears that convergent evolution is even more prevalent among memes than genes. (As a side note, if one believes, like Gould, in punctuated equilibrium, then ‘species’ would still be valid in an evolutionary timescale. Perhaps this is why the paleoanthropologists are still arguing?)
tt
I got sidetracked—back to the book. (Speaking of sidetracked, Dawkins is the master of the interesting aside and the lengthy digression; and, even more impressively, he always manages to tie his asides and digressions neatly back into the main theme under discussion.) Well, I’m afraid I don’t have very much more to say, other than this: if you find yourself with a supply of long walks, and need an audiobook as accompaniment, you might as well download Dawkins’s crisp, dry, whispery voice, and deepen your understanding of the flora and fauna around you—whether it be this book or, if you want a real treat, his first.

While I enjoyed it, Mr Dawkins is probably the ultimate preacher for the choir. More people would be convinced watching an episode of Sagan's Cosmos than slugging through this book. I still remember how Cosmos changed the teenage me. Just remember the high-and-mighty all-smiles Sagan! This preacher, one Ricky Dawkins, with his pompous writing, repeating the same phrases, picking fight with other preachers of the same flock (like Reverend Steven J Gould) and offering the worldview that no other beliefs have a sensible place en este mundo may actually repulse a lot of would-be converts.
But what I cannot deny is, I am a sucker for this preacher. Through and through.

If you are interested in evolutionary biology I would highly recommend this book. The author is very aggressive in convincing the reader in evolution by means of cumulative natural selection compare to all the other beliefs (natural selection in one step, creationist, etc.)

I've read the Serbo-Croatian translation Slepi Časovničar autora Ričarda Dokinsa Heliks 2010 publishing / 496 pages / 133,407 words.

کتاب «ساعت‌ساز نابینا» نام تنها اثری است که از ریچارد داوکینز در داخل کشور ترجمه و چاپ شده است. چاپ کتابی از این اندیشمند که یکی از معروف‌ترین آتئیست‌های حال حاضر جهان می‌باشد در ایران علاوه بر اینکه مایه شگفتی است حرکتی بسیار قابل ستایش است، چرا که علاوه بر اینکه جوانان جویای علم را با زبانی ساده و قابل فهم با نظریات روز علم زیست‌شناسی آشنا می‌سازد، فرصتی را نیز فراهم می‌کند تا به دلایل این نویسنده برای رد آفرینش انسان و طبیعت آشنا شده و در مورد آن به تفکر پردازخته و حتی با پیشرفت نظری، امکان نقد و بحث و گفتگو درباره آن‌ها فراهم آمده و این دلایل به چالش کشیده شوند.
مطالب ذکر شده در کتاب از بسیاری جهات برای فهم طبیعت، کلیدی بوده و بینشی عمیق و شگفت‌انگیز در مورد حیات و جنبه‌های مختلف آن به انسان می‌دهد. لحن دشمنانه‌ی داوکینز نسبت مذهب که خود به آن معترف است، در این کتاب نسبت به کتاب‌های دیگرش کمرنگ‌تر است و آن هم به دلیل پرداختن بیشتر به مسائل زیستی مورد تخصص داوکینز و دور شدن نسبی از مسائل فلسفی و مذهبی می‌باشد. با این حال در جای جای کتاب و مخصوصاً در اواخر آن، تئوری آفریده شدن طبیعت و انسان را با توجه به یافته‌های علمی‌اش به طور کامل و قاطع رد می‌کند و آن را توضیح مناسبی برای این همه عظمت و پیچیدگی نمی‌داند.

نظریات داوکینز نتیجه قرن‌های متمادی تفکر انسان در طبیعت و به طور خاص بیش از یک قرن داروینیسم بوده و علاوه بر قابل ستایش بودن، رد کردن آن‌ها از لحاظ علمی کار آسانی نیست امّا اشتباهی که داوکینز در هنگام جدا شدن از مباحث مورد تخصص‌اش و وارد شدن به وادی فلسفه و خداشناسی می‌کند نباید از نظر دور بمانند. داوکینز آفرینش تدریجی و اینکه هیچ نیروی غیرطبیعی در آفرینش موجودات نقش نداشته است را دال بر این می‌داند که این موجودات توسط نیروی ماورایی آفریده نشده‌اند و حاصل چند میلیارد سال فرگشت می‌باشند. این نظر زمانی درست است که آفرینش انسان و دیگر موجودات را آنی و نتیجه‌ی مستقیم نیروهای ماورایی بدانیم حال اینکه با توجه به آیات و روایات در قرآن و احادیث آفرینش انسان به صورت آنی نبوده است و تدریجاً صورت گرفته است که در پست «آفرینش تدریجی یا آنی» به آن مفصلاً پرداخته شده است. از طرف دیگر خدا جهان و طبیعت را طبق قوانینی که آفریده است اداره می‌کند و دخالت مکرر خداوند در سیر آفرینش علاوه بر اینکه کامل نبودن سیستم افریده شده توسط وی را می‌رساند این تصور را هم بوجود می‌آورد که خداوند تحت زمان قرار دارد. همانطور که مشاهده می‌شود داوکینز اشتباهی را که امروزه بسیار در علم تجربی رایج است تکرار نموده و با نگاه جزئی به طبیعت و نیروهای طبیعی آن‌ها را محور قرار داده و وجود آفریننده را برای آن‌ها در نظر نمی‌گیرد.
یکی از مسائل جذاب دیگری که در این کتاب مطرح می‌شود بررسی فرضیات شروع حیات می‌باشد که دو مدل اصلی که تابحال برای شروع حیات ارائه شده‌اند را مورد بررسی قرار می‌دهد. این دو مدل عبارتند از مدل «سوپ بنیادین» که قبلا در مباحث علمی زیاد به آن پرداخته شده است و مدل جدیدتر و پیشرفته‌تر شروع حیات از بلورهای کانی مواد معدنی خاک رس و گل می‌باشد.

what a dilettante. had to read this for class and it was the sloppiest writing i encountered all semester. Dawkins wants to make a claim for the defense of wonder in his Watchmaker analogy but wonder for him may only go so far as encountering a world consisting of only fact and artifact. This dogmatic assertion kind of puts a significant limiter on the line of questioning one may consider, much less wonder over.

What is apparent here is that William Paley's defense of design takes up the same sort of Extrincism that Dawkins employs and is likewise an insufficient notion of an Infinite, Transcendent, All-Knowing, Creator. Basically, Dawkins and Paley are the same sort of Dualists. Dawkins just assigns agency to a different cause than Paley does. So Dawkins can write off the whole as of no interest what-so-ever. Wholes are only in service to the lowest unit of selection, (which just so happens to come down to the gene). But Dawkins assigns genes as as the almost magical driver for biology, anchoring the gene to all sorts of "just-so" stories.

If you're looking for the New Atheist with a scienc-y hat, who will say outlandish things and make accusations regarding all sorts of tribal biases and dogmas while pulling a nice sleight of hand in which he replaces those biases with the ones he prefers...I guess Dawkins is your man. On the other hand, if you're really interested in getting a grasp of how genetic biology actually works, I would suggest reading some one like Richard Lewontin, (an actual practicing evolutionary biologist rather than a celebrity provocateur). He is a bit more difficult to read, but hey, it's real science. Neither Dawkins nor Lewontin can answer the question "how did we get here?" and that is fine. The key here is knowing the limits that Dawkins is insisting on. Again, I just don't get how he can claim to be a defender of wonder and then consider all questions closed that do not go through his reading of what a gene is. Particularly, when a large portion of the field of geneticists tend to disagree with a lot of Dawkins more scienc-y assertions.

Bottom line, It's really a stretch to assert "hey look a gene, therefore no God!...or therefore, the gene is God...or agency...or uh." Whatever, Dawkins. Knock yourself out. Science will laugh at you in a century or two.

Dawkins' work set the base for the 'New Atheism' movement. God Bless him (LOL). Will vehemently defend all Dawkins tomes for that reason alone.
Yes, there are better books on Natural selection than this. Yes, some of the examples/arguments made here raise more questions than answers. But the purpose of some books is (in my layperson opinion) to bring awareness of concepts to the larger audience, and in this Dawkins succeeded.

As the title's extension spells out, this is a definitive (as of '87) rebuttal against all comers in favor of Darwinism, but don't let my saying so prove it. Read it for yourself.

All his arguments are crystal clear, but he takes extra time to caricature the caricature of Darwinists, pointing out exactly how the ad absurdum argument really works while also elucidating the fine points of what Darwinism IS versus what it is NOT.

He steps us through the first third of the book showing us how Selection works: from an energy standpoint, a competition standpoint, and a sexual standpoint... from the basic building blocks of proteins to more and more complex forms of DNA and the combo cells that collect all the wonderful multicellular creations, including bacteria, that eventually wind up creating us. The descriptions are quite beautiful and clear and all the while, we've got all the foundations for life... without Intelligent Design.

The argument is simple, of course. If we can explain everything, and I mean everything that is life and physics, then what purpose does adding a superfluous layer to the explanation serve?

This is ten years worth of hate mail for the author, people. He has been beset on all sides with genuinely curious and well-meaning seekers of the god-fearing sort and inundated with screaming lunatics telling him he'll burn in hell for his first book, The Selfish Gene, which, by the way, didn't really give a rat's ass about creationism or the people who support it. It just laid out a very cogent theory that fit all the copious mountains of data in biology. And yet, after that point, a Mr. Dawkins who professes not to want or need a PR team or lawyers, decides to put his foot down and tackle the problem that has reared its muti-angled head in his direction and DEFEND Darwinism.

He does so beautifully, I might add.

Every step of the way, he defines the complaints with due diligence and proceeds to demolish them sonar-producing batlike grace, with light humor, sharp intellect, and sometimes he makes of his opponents an overzealous meal.

Can you blame him? Granted, by this point it's only been a decade of Creationist hate. Give it a decade or a decade and a half more before we see a truly flame worthy attack from Mr.Dawkins. I'm looking forward to seeing some of it in his books. I hope it's there and not just in his interviews which I still haven't seen. Alas.

Seriously, though, this book is pretty wonderful for its lucid and quoteworthy passages and vivid descriptions of how Darwinism works, from gene level to the kinds of time-spans that can only be described as geological when it comes to real changes in evolution. I particularly loved the fact that he used computer terminology to describe how our genes are nothing more than complex computers. I've heard this before, of course, but the way he laid it out was particularly enlightening.

This stuff is pretty damn great. Just from the science viewpoint, even leaving out the whole defense, it's well worth reading and not nearly as acerbic or rabid as certain other mass-produced troll-attacks make him appear. But then again, I've only read one of his later books, the The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, which was just a charming bi-modal description of science versus magical thinking which also happened to "gently" draw people away from having to add that extra layer of explanation to reality. :) I guess I'll see what the other books bring, no?

At the time, this was a tough book for me to read. Considering the way I was raised - in a heavily religious atmosphere - it was hard for me to accept the theory of evolution. However, Dawkins very clearly lays out the theory in a way that anyone can understand if they are willing to open their mind just a little and put in just a little effort. It might be hard to accept but its even harder to dispute. Reality is like that. I think everyone should be required to read this book.

DNF at %31

Dawkins loves explaining evolutionary theory, and this is one of his best books. My favourite bit is the section on long-tailed birds (peacocks, etc). From the point of view of simple utility, they are rather baffling. What use could you possibly have for that long, stupid tail?

But, as Dawkins keeps reminding us, it's not about survival of the species, or even of the individual, but rather of the gene. Suppose there's a sex-linked male gene that disposes towards long tails, and a sex-linked female gene that disposes towards finding long tails attractive. A child born of a union between two individuals carrying these genes will be likely to have both of them. Hence, if it's male, it'll have a long tail, and if it's female it will prefer males with long tails. If this combination becomes common, long-tailed males will have a larger and larger advantage in terms of being preferred by females. Tails will lengthen until the practical downside (being unable to fly, avoid predators, etc) counterbalances the upside of efficiently attracting potential mates.

I read this, and suddenly looked at supermodels in a new light. God, they're hot! In fact, if they were any hotter they'd be dead.

Here are some key points I gathered from this wonderful wonderful book:

- According to Dawkins, Darwinism seems to be more in need of advocacy than other branches of science. For instance, many people have no grasp of quantum mechanics, but that doesn't make them oppose the theory as nonsense. This could have religious implications.

- One big problem with Darwinism is that everybody thinks he understands it.

- The main reason why most people disbelieve Darwinism is that our brains are built to deal with events on radically different timescales from those that characterize evolutionary change. We have no difficulty visualizing processes that take seconds, minutes, years and decades at most to complete, whereas evolutionary change transpires in millions or hundreds of millions of years.

- Man-made artifacts like computers and cars are obviously designed for a purpose, yet they are not alive. They are made of metal and plastic rather than of flesh and blood. We are designed on a drawing board too, but were our parts assembled by a skilled engineer? the answer is no. When Charles Darwin first explained the matter, many people either wouldn't or couldn't grasp it.

- This book is a rebuttal to William Paley's book (Which I have not read yet) called "natural theology". In this book which was lauded by Darwin and Dawkins as an inspiring book at the time, Paley uses the analogy of a watch you find in the middle of a road. Upon seeing such a complex apparatus (think of all the cogs and springs and things used in a watch to make it work), you immediately realize that it must be the product of some intelligent design. It makes no sense to declare it just happened to lie there higgledy-piggledy by mere chance or accident. According to Paley a human organ like an eye is much more complex than a watch, therefore like the watch which requires a watchmaker, the eye requires a designer, or does it?

- According to Dawkins, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics. Natural selection is the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered.

- Natural selection does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight. It can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, but it's the blind watchmaker and hence the title of this book.

- Evidence for evolution is overwhelming, in fact it is so overwhelming that even most theologians have given up believing in instantaneous creation. Nevertheless, many of these theologians have tried to smuggle God in by the back door, so to speak, and they allow him some sort of supervisory role over the course that evolution has taken. Dawkins rightly asserts that we cannot disprove beliefs like these. Be that as it may, there are some problems with these beliefs. Firstly, that they are superfluous and, secondly, that they assume the existence of the main thing we want to explain, namely organized complexity. If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guided evolution, that deity must have already been vastly complex in the first place.

* This book is a must-read and highly recommended for anyone who is curious about nature. There are many things I learned like idea of arms races, or what mutations are and what's random and nonrandom and so much more.