An irreducibly complex book

This is Darwin, not Dawkins

Richard Dawkins have written several books the titles of which have become household words: "The Selfish Gene", "The God Delusion" and "The Blind Watchmaker". I'm still waiting for "The Extended Phenotype" to join this exclusive club!

"The Blind Watchmaker" was first published in 1986 and has become something of a modern classic. I'm sure you heard of Dawkins' biomorphs, The Argument from Personal Incredulity, that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, or that the random movements of molecules might make a statue of the Virgin Mary wave at us. All those sound bites come from "The Blind Watchmaker".

It should be noted, that "The Blind Watchmaker" isn't a general introduction to Darwin or Neo-Darwinism. Its scope is narrower - if you can call a book by Dawkins "narrow". The point of the book is to elucidate how Neo-Darwinism can explain the existence of complexity and apparent design in the universe, without recourse to a supernatural designer. To a large extent, Dawkins' book is an anti-creationist polemic, although few actual creationists are mentioned by name. When I read the book the first time, I was somewhat annoyed by the constant references to creationists and near-creationists, but the strength of the creationist movement in the US makes such an approach necessary in a book with global scope. Dawkins also criticizes Lamarckianism. Finally, he takes on more robust scientific alternatives to Neo-Darwinism, including Gould's and Eldredge's theory of punctuated equilibrium. The book isn't an easy read, despite the weirdly lucid style of the author. I guess you could say that the book is irreducibly complex! It's nevertheless rewarding, once you manage to get through it. It's also a very polemical work, with Dawkins saying exactly what he thinks of his opponents (well, almost).

Creationist or anti-Darwinist arguments tackled in the book include "evolution is all about randomness and chance", "chance can't create complex structures", "what good is half an eye", "Darwinism can't be falsified", "Gould and Eldredge have disproved Darwinian evolution" and "cladistics prove that Darwin was wrong". Dawkins points out that evolution isn't all about chance, indeed natural selection is a *non*random process (this is what made evangelical preacher Tedd Haggard angry when confronted by Dawkins in a much later TV documentary). He points out that evolution is cumulative and gradual, that there are many examples of useful "half-eyes" in the natural world, and that even the origins of life might have been cumulative and gradual. Dawkins also believes that the Neo-Darwinian synthesis can accommodate the punctuated equlibria proposed by Gould and Eldredge, and that the media has badly distorted the scientific in-house debates about evolutionary mechanisms and cladistics. As for falsification, our author points out that Darwin's theories *can* be falsified, for instance by anomalous fossils. As a humorous side point, I noticed that Dawkins mentions Charles Raven and the cuckoos, but then forgets to respond. Don't worry. A response to Canon Raven can be found in N.B. Davies' "Cuckoos, cowbirds and other cheats" (see my review of that book).

Whether the book will really convince anti-evolutionists is perhaps another matter. Dawkins is an outspoken atheist and materialist, and he even proudly calls himself "reductionist". People with religious objections to Darwinism will find this volume hard to swallow. So will functional atheists who for whatever reason find the blindness of the watchmaker unappealing. I admit a certain sympathy for that position! A problematic chapter is the one where Dawkins attempts to assimilate Gould's and Eldredge's theory with Neo-Darwinism, charging that the theory isn't really anti-Darwinist at all, except at a poetic or rhetorical level. But surely Gould and Eldredge meant what they said when they suggested that natural selection plays a minor role in evolution, while macromutations and constraining Baupläne are more important? Was that just rhetoric? I think not. Nor does it sound like Charles Robert Darwin, FRS.

Despite this problem, "The Blind Watchmaker" nevertheless makes a powerful case for Neo-Darwinism. It cannot be lightly dismissed. Any attempt to do so, would have to be very intelligently designed!

Any takers?

I give Professor Dawkins' book four stars out of five, and warmly recommend the book to fearless seekers.

PS. I'm not a reductionist. ;-)