The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without D

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		The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without D
		The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without D

基本信息·出版社：W. W. Norton & Co.
·页码：400 页
·出版日期：1996年09月
·ISBN：0393315703
·条形码：9780393315707
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
·外文书名：盲人钟表匠

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"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--is the blind watchmaker in nature.
作者简介 Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and is the author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Devil's Chaplain, and The Ancestor's Tale.
编辑推荐 Amazon.com Review
Richard Dawkins is not a shy man. Edward Larson's research shows that most scientists today are not formally religious, but Dawkins is an in-your-face atheist in the witty British style:

I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence.

The title of this 1986 work, Dawkins's second book, refers to the Rev. William Paley's 1802 work, Natural Theology, which argued that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Not so, says Dawkins: "All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way... it is the blind watchmaker."

Dawkins is a hard-core scientist: he doesn't just tell you what is so, he shows you how to find out for yourself. For this book, he wrote Biomorph, one of the first artificial life programs. You can check Dawkins's results on your own Mac or PC.

From Publishers Weekly
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene ( LJ 12/1/76), persuasively argues the case for Darwinian evolution. He criticizes the prominent punctuationist school, and takes issue with the views of creationists and others who believe that life arose by design of a deity. Using the evolution of various animals as examples and drawing parallels from improvements in modern technology, Dawkins demonstrates the logic of the selection process and of an incremental evolution whose end products are the highly complex, functional organisms we know today. This provocative work is likely to generate further controversy in the scientific community. Recommended for informed laypersons, undergraduates, and scholars. Joseph Hannibal, Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
According to Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, each one of the ten trillion cells in the human body contains more genetic information than the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica (and without sending a salesman to your door), yet it appears that 90 percent of all our genetic material doesn't do anything at all. It just sits there, like Uncle Fred and Aunt Mabel when they drop by on a Sunday. -- Bill Bryson, in I'm a Stranger Here Myself, published by Broadway Books, 1999

As readable and vigorous a defense of Darwinism as has been published since 1859. -- The Economist

Dawkins has done more than anyone else now writing to make evolutionary biology comprehensible and acceptable to a general audience. -- John Maynard Smith

Every page rings of truth. It is one of the best science books-one of the best any books-I have ever read. -- Lee Dembart, Los Angeles Times

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