...one of my aims in the book is to convey something of the sheer wonder of biological complexity to those whose eyes have not been opened to it. But having built up the mystery, my other main aim is to remove it again by explaining the solution...

He managed the above, but I didn't enjoy this as much as The Selfish Gene or The God Delusion. It delves deeper & wanders around Darwinian Evolution & other theories more than I want or need. I hadn't planned to read this since I understood this from his updated edition of The Selfish Gene, but I found it cheap & needed to bump my Amazon order a bit for free shipping. I'm glad I did.

My interest varied & I don't think I would have gotten through a text version without a lot of skimming. He addresses issues/controversies in great detail that I didn't know existed nor was I particularly interested in them, so I found the long refutation boring. Often he digressed to build the knowledge & logic which proves why the other theory or claim is wrong. I find about half of these wanderings interesting, while some just beat the particular subject to death.

He starts the preface with the following:
This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet...

So, I was easily able to finish it & even wanted more due to the wonderful narration &, for all that my interest flagged occasionally, there was plenty of fascinating material. That's incredible in light of the age of this book. Quite a few of the science books & articles I've read that were half as old were terribly dated, but Dawkins is dealing with the theory itself, how genetic change & natural selection works over long time periods to build complex systems, instead of details which may have been superseded as technology runs on.

Some of the best parts are his opinions of other scientists. He's very fast to give credit to others where it is due. He touts other books & scientists as better or more thorough on some points while he is obviously incensed at a few. At one point, he finished a particularly scathing denunciation & said perhaps he should go out & dig up the garden. He didn't try for a lot of humor, but when it popped up like that it was great. Even when he's peeved, he is polite & gives them their due, though.

His ability to simplify & make sense of large numbers & statistical probability is absolutely masterful. It was great to be able to fiddle with the biomorph program. A search for "Biomorph Breeder Program" brings up several interesting ones similar to those Dawkins wrote & used. I understood Dawkins' explanations just fine, but actually playing with the program is really worth it. The extreme effects of random change over time are amazing. He's right, we aren't equipped to really understand large numbers or long times, the obvious problem with Young Earth Creationists' beliefs. Of course, those I know somehow make intentional ignorance & a belief in magic a positive attribute. I find their intellectual dishonesty infuriating, especially so when they try to foist them on me, especially in matters of public policy. (Beliefs should remain private. Public discourse requires facts & logic or there can be no reasoning with each other.)

One thing I really missed was an explanation of what a species is. (Does he address speciation in The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene?) For years I thought the criterion was simply the ability to breed with the result of fertile offspring. Then I read this article:
https://thelogicofscience.com/2017/08...
IOW, I was certain in my ignorance & now that I know more, I'm unsure & somewhat bewildered - a good thing from a scientific point of view, but the lack weakened his arguments a bit for me simply because I spent too much time wondering about it. Still, it had no real bearing on his argument even in the chapter on taxonomy. I had no idea taxonomists disagreed so much. I thought I was the only person who made such a muddle of filing. I loved Dawkins' comparisons to library science. It really made a lot more sense of clades & the various other organization schemes.

Table of Contents
Chapter I: Explaining the very improbable
Chapter 2: Good design
Chapter 3: Accumulating small change
Chapter 4: Making tracks through animal space
Chapter 5: The power and the archives
Chapter 6: Origins and miracles
Chapter 7: Constructive evolution
Chapter 8: Explosions and spirals
Chapter 9: Puncturing punctuationism
Chapter 10: The one true tree of life
Chapter 11: Doomed rivals

It was an excellent read & I'll be referring to parts of it the rest of my life. He says that Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones... He manages the latter most of the time. A truly gifted educator.

یا ترجمه کتاب با اشکالات و اشتباهاتی همراه است یا کتاب برای مخاطب ایرانی نیاز به پیش نیازهایی دارد یا کتاب برای مخاطبان اروپایی و آمریکایی نوشته شده و به نوعی برای آن مخاطب همه فهم و عامه پسند است و یا اساسن ساعت ساز نابینا کتاب علمی و نسبتن دشواری ست.
با این حال اما با تمام سختی های موجود در مقابل این سد بلند سانسور صنعت نشر ساعت ساز نابینا کتاب مفید به فایده‌ای است که به بسیاری از پرسش های مطرح در باب منشاء حیاتِ موجودات پاسخ می دهد

I think this might be the fifth book I read by Dawkins, so probably thats why I dont give a straight five star rating, because some parts felt like a repetition upon a repetition. Let alone the many videos and interviews I´ve watched. However, this is a great book that clearly I would have enjoyed a lot more had it been the first I read. It explains in relatively simple terms why Darwin was right in his theory and why many other theories that explain life are flawed. I was checking and apparently this is his second or third most popular book only after the obviously controversial God delusion and his (in my opinion) masterwork The selfish gene.

I stare at this book every time I climb the stairs, taunting me to read it. I really had planned to, until I started catching documentaries featuring the author. Not that Dawkins and my beliefs are that far off. If I heard his statements in a neutral tone I would probably assume someone had picked my brain. But his intonation is so...demeaning, I truly have trouble listening to him.

Then I read Behe's Darwin's Black Box. Annoying! (but you can read my review.) He kept telling us what Dawkins said a decade before, in The Blind Watchmaker. It didn't ring true. I decided I had to see for myself.

The book isn't nearly as irritating as his documentaries. Either that or he has gotten totally fed up in the last 25 years or so. I can't say I blame him. I just wish he would be more polite about it.

I have to say I'm not quite sure what Behe's complaints are. Behe has all these questions that he says Dawkins brings up but doesn't answer, not even an 'I don't know yet'. Instead he claims Dawkins just ignores the questions. In my reading Dawkins answers exactly the questions Behe asks for, despite the fact that Dawkins wrote this book a decade before Behe wrote his. I ended by suspecting that Behe hadn't actually read the book he was attacking.

If you can only read one of the two, choose Dawkins. Behe just embarrasses himself.

Dawkins’comes up with some good ideas, concepts and examples of explaining evolution, like the development of the eye and bat sonar, and to his credit mentions speciesism and the arms race in nature. I like this line ‘Evolution continually became stuck up sterile blind alleys. Degeneration seemed to be the commonest outcome of even the most carefully guided evolution.’ Idiocracy for sure. He goes on about the sieve principle of selection, how things are arranged in nature as they are, the product of physical forces and reactions. And evolution having no long-term goal, and never starting from a clean drawing board. On the life cycle of the cicada and the way it combats predators. The thylacine ... ‘Maybe they were pests to humans, but humans were much bigger pests to them; now there are no thylacines left and a considerable surplus of humans.’

However, Dawkins is not a very good story teller and presents science in a very verbose and convoluted manner. e.g. the way he goes on about the tail length of birds as a means of sexual selection. And considering it an honour to be fossilised. Does he want immortality? He comes up with irritating made up words like ‘existenceworthiness’, and a chapter entitled ‘Puncturing Punctuationism’, and Saltationist and transformed cladists. I think he enjoys being pedantic, and like evolution, his narrative ends up in a cul-de-sac. There is the basic contradiction of ‘intelligent design’ and the ‘blind watchmaker’. He concludes that the Blind Watchmaker programme was endowed with richness, versatility, luxuriance and beauty. It all boils down to whether you think the ‘blind watchmaker’ has done a good job, or should have that damn watch rammed up where the sun don’t shine. This is like comparing his ‘lucky ones’ quote from ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’, and the universe having ‘no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference’ from ‘River Out of Eden’. I prefer the latter. But he should really stick to the day job.

The good part: Dawkins is a great writer. His style is very conversational and the book very quotable. His arguments follow a defined path but still manage to meander through welcome asides. He uses metaphors and thought experiments well, most of the book was very easy to follow.

And what arguments he makes! The probability of miracles, potential precursors of RNA, the importance of gradual change. His goal is to show that it's possible to explain the rise of complexity from a simple world and he spectacularly succeeds.

However, I'm likely not the intended audience of this book. He spent more time arguing against alternative theories than I would have liked. I had no idea what Mutationism was before he explained it but it sounded dumb within the first few sentences; he didn't need to spend as many pages dismissing it as he did. Same with the entire chapter on Punctuationism. The first few pages went over some really cool notes on speciation and how some large mutations fit into darwinism that the book wouldn't have been complete without. The rest of the chapter tried to defend darwinism from a media I had never paid attention to in the first place.

The last third of the book is worth reading because it contains a few insights. But, finishing it is true drudgery and tarnishes my impression of the book as a whole.

Enchantingly beautiful fiction, 23 Mar 2007


Musings of a fideist (a materialistic fideist).

Richard Dawkins has a breathtaking gift for expressive, catchy writing. His handling of illustration and narrative flow like silk. Yet he reminds me of an eloquent 19th century clergyman. His persistent dedication to the high altar of gradualistic explanation, however incredibly improbable, stretches credulity to breaking point. Take for example his extraordinary leap on p.134, para 1, where self-replicating RNA will almost magically come into being - 'all so utterly simple and automatic'. There it is by fiat - Dawkins wishes and so it must be! Abracadabra! Those who have worked in the field know how fasitidious and temperamental RNA and enzymes can be even in the best conditions - yet here it is in rock pool. There are some problems even billions of years won't solve - ask the mathematicians.

Or take his extraordinary and uncharacteristically rambling tautology about the peacock's tail, pp 203-206, which boils down to an unexplained discrepancy in tail length (p204) and majority female taste (p205)! This is no cogent defence of evolution of an extraordinarily complex structure, just a mystical will-of-the-wisp-like weaving of concepts to meet his desired end.

He reiterates Darwin's acid test of his own theory, on p 91, but if really believed what he wrote there, he would have abandoned neo-Darwinism years ago - I have long since published one very clear example of what he seeks, and his written answer to me was that he couldn't answer it, and there are myriad more.


Dawkins is a magician with words, though not as self critical and cautious as he ought to be with scientific argument.

As per the synopsis:

The Blind Watchmaker is the seminal text for understanding evolution today. In the eighteenth century, theologian William Paley developed a famous metaphor for creationism: that of the skilled watchmaker. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins crafts an elegant riposte to show that the complex process of Darwinian natural selection is unconscious and automatic. If natural selection can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is a blind one—working without foresight or purpose.

In an eloquent, uniquely persuasive account of the theory of natural selection, Dawkins illustrates how simple organisms slowly change over time to create a world of enormous complexity, diversity, and beauty.

---------------------

This book is in part an evidenced argument for, and an explanation of evolution. As such it includes lengthy clarifications of how to interpret the terms used (there are fine distinctions in a number of different terms, such as with macromutations). In addition to delineating cumulative progression and natural selection, it also ranges in dissecting the utterly impossible, the improbable, and probable. A companion book that includes more functional detail is Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable, and another more recent book that gets into detailed evolution workings is Sean B. Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom.

This my second reading since about 1990, and what I still see in this writing is purpose without foresight.

That is, given all the variations and complexity of extant biological life and extinctions that we know of, and awareness of many more we don't have evidence of, taken together with what we have discovered about cumulative progression and natural selection, a logical mind can see the reality of evolution over creationism and other lacking theories. That especially where objective inquiry seeks to free the mind from the human bubble, contrasted with creationism which in ignoring growing empirical understanding is supposition to dominate minds. Their are details that aren't yet fully understood, but the only real mystery remaining is how a self-replicating molecule that life descended from came to be, when and how did DNA/protein machinery develop in such, and if there was only one occurrence.

The growing empirical evidence points to the path of our being as a punctuated cumulative progression under the influence of natural selection. How we ended up in the pickle we are in is due to natural selection being a blind, unconscious, automatic process that selects for seeming survivability and reproduction in an environment — genes are selected first and foremost, not for their intrinsic qualities, but by virtue of their interactions with their environments. The selection process has though, albeit selectively and possibly unintentionally, endowed us with the intelligence to potentially see where this path is leading us in a successively deteriorating conducive biosphere. All life forms alter their habitat, spurring environmental changes in geological time that adaptive evolution attempts to keep pace with through natural selection, but our weedy species is altering the environment at such an accelerated pace that we are witnessing worsening environmental changes and excessive extinctions within our lifetimes.

One aspect that a serious reader might glean from this book isn't stated in so many words. That is, the more biologically complicated a life form is, the smaller the adaptive evolution steps because of the greater population of genes that must be interacted with in the life form. Thus, if significant, detrimental biosphere changes occur faster than adaptive evolution steps can keep pace . . .

If one is interested in their and their children's futures, a realistic understanding of how we came to be, and the evolutionary baggage that includes, is important in learning what we have to overcome. Thus, this book is a good first step. Additional understanding to pursue are life sciences such as ecology (biodiversity and ecosystem balance are essential components in slowing biosphere changes).

Why would you philosophize instead of presenting your alleged "scientific" evidence? Because you have no evidence. You are just an idiot Dawkins. His basic dissertation is: We have genes, then it means there is no God. Did he convince us? quiet the opposite. Dawkins is forever blind as the watchmaker in this regard.

In order to prove that Pointless, blind and purposeless evolution is statistically possible, would you imagine what did he do? He CREATED a computer program, FEED the program with information "intelligence", and when the CREATED, Intelligent program worked, what did Dawkins concluded? That evolution is BLIND and serves no DESIGN, would you believe this rubbish is still selling? Honestly, I'm at a loss for words to express just how wrong and misleading his computer program was. If he wanted to prove intelligent design he couldn't have done better than to create "evolution" guided by a goal function.

الكتاب ثري جدًا بالمعلومات، ودوكينز أسلوبه جذاب جدًا ومن نوعية المتحدث البارع اللي بيمهدلك كتير قبل ما يوصل للب الفكرة وبيضربلك أمثلة كتيرة عشان يدلل عليها، وده هيحتاج منك إنك تكون مركز مع الفكرة "المحاجة" الأساسية اللي بيتكلم عنها في الفصل لإنه كتير مهايحيد عنها قبل ما يرجعلها تاني، وده كان عيب بصراحة بالنسبالي في أحيان، وخلاني أراجع فصول مرة تانية، إلا إن الكتاب في المجمل ثري وممتع ويستحق هذه المراجعة عادي D:
الفكرة الأساسية اللي كان بيأكد عليها إنه هيتكلم عن إن التطور الدارويني أو التطور بالانتخاب الطبيعي التراكمي التدريجي هي النظرية الوحيدة القادرة من حيث المبدأ على تفسير وجود التركب المنظم -زي أعضاء الحيوانات والأنظمة اللي طوروها عشان يتكيفوا بيها مع البيئة بتاعتهم- والتطور الدارويني في لبه بسيط جدًا، وهو إن التكاثر في وجود التباين الوراثي اللي بيتيحه الطفر والانتخاب الطبيعي التراكمي التدريجي اللاعشوائي مع إتاحة الزمن الكافي هيؤدي إلى نتائج تطورية أبعد من الخيال، في خلال الفكرة دي هيتكلم على كذا فكرة تانية زي DNA وإنه ازاي مركز تكنولوجيا معلومات عظيم ومقوماته الضرورية لبداية الانتخاب التراكمي، ونظريات نشأة الحياة وهل الانتخاب الطبيعي يستطيع البناء؟ بمعنى إنه المعروف إنه بيحذف الجينات الفاشلة من المستودع الجيني وده درب من دروب البناء -زي نحت التمثال- بس هل ينفع أفسر حاجة بالانتخاب الطبيعي الدارويني طبعًا فيها ما يتماثل مع البناء أكتر من الحذف؟، والانتخاب الجنسي، وآخر تلات فصول هيخصصهم للدفاع عن التطور بالانتخاب الدارويني ضد ما يزعم إنه بدايل وهيفند كل بديل منهم وهيحاول يثبت فكرته الأساسية. ولو صح القول إن فيه أسلوب اتبعه في التدليل فهو أسلوب يغلب عليه قياس الاحتمالات.
هايلي ريكومنديد لأي حد مهتم يقرأ عن التطور، من غير المتخصصين طبعًا.

على عكس الشائع عن دوكنز في الأوساط الإسلامية أنه غير منطقي و أطروحاته ربما ترقى إلى السخافة, لم أجده كذلك في المجمل. بل يطرح رؤية ثم يستدل عليها بأدلة علمية و عقلية منطقية (سواء اقتنعت بها أم لم تقتنع). و ربما يدعو هذا إلى النظر في باقي كتبه.

الكتاب يتحدث أساسا عن قضية التطور و أسسها من طفرات عشوائية و انتخاب طبيعي (غير عشوائي حسب وصفه) مع
إتاحة الزمن الكافي, و هو ما يقاس بملايين السنين. و عن أن هذا التطور قادر بذاته بلا توجيه من أحد (إله) على صنع كل ما يبدو في الكون على أنه تركيب زكي و تنظيم معقد مثل العين البشرية أو آلية الرؤية عند الخفاش.
لا يتحدث الكتاب بشكل مباشر عن الإلحاد و لكن ظلال الموضوع لا تخلو منه.

ضرب الأمثلة الكثيرة و الاستطراد في الشرح كثيرا و طويلا و الخروج من الموضوع الأساسي لتبيان و توضيح مواضيع فرعية سمات تتكرر كثيرا في الكتاب.

.

Classic Dawkins, but less powerful a thesis than Selfish Gene or God Delusion.
In this book, Dawkins takes on the arduous task of countering supposed arguments against Darwinism.
He takes on Punctuated Equilibrium, Saltation, Gradualism, Creationism, etc.
He makes good philosophical arguments supported by sturdy biological facts.
Since he's dismissing mostly fringe elements, this book is more empowering than enlightening.
Worth a read if you're a fan of Dawkins.