Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker

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Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker : Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 1986. 332 pages.

I read Dawkins' book immediately before reading Daniel C. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Both books are strong arguments supporting Darwinism; together they make a powerful effect. The two had such similar goals that much of the following discussion about both is shared between the two book notes.

These two books attack what started out -- and still remains -- the biggest conceptual hurdle for most to overcome in accepting natural selection as the mechanism of evolution ("Darwin's Dangerous Idea", as Dennett names it): How could all the complexity of the natural world, its apparent design, have arisen naturally through the seemingly random process of evolution? Both authors build very strong arguments along very similar lines, but they do it with distinctly individual voices and styles.

Dawkin's style is excited exuberance as he hurries breathlessly from topic to topic: too little time, too many fascinating things to talk about to dwell for long on one. There is no feeling of being intellectually short changed, though, more a feeling of going for the big picture and an intuitive understanding. In contrast Dennett takes a slower, more philosophically considered approach: this topic is too interesting and too complex to speed ahead – let's linger and really, really understand it. By the end, the big picture emerges from layers of careful consideration. Each suits its author, the two products are stimulating, and both succeed admirably. My own taste inclines more towards Dennett's approach, but I found both books engaging and enlightening.

Given the similarities of thesis, it's certainly not surprising that both books hike along similar paths, albeit in different ways. Mark it down, perhaps, as convergent evolution that both authors felt the need to develop extended metaphors – a chapter in each book – to elucidate the idea that phenotypic expression of the genotype is highly constrained, i.e., very few mutations in the DNA lead to viable creatures, and very few of all imaginable variants in phenotype can likewise be brought about by variations in the genotype. Dawkins invents a computer model to examine the possible mutations in the "genes" of what he calls "biomorphs". Dennett constructs an intellectual model that he calls the "Library of Mendel", patterned after the literary "Library of Babel" of Jorge Luis Borges. Of the two I thought that Dennett's metaphor had more depth to it, but Dawkins' served its purpose well enough.

Despite how thoroughly and digestibly both books present a comprehensive understanding of how natural selection can produce the amazing complexity of plant and animal life on Earth, one has the sinking feeling that those who might profit most from reading these works will probably never actually peek between the covers. On the other hand, even if they are preaching to the choir, it is no doubt beneficial if the choir can sing better than ever after the sermon. In the end – and one can judge this to some extent since both books are now over ten years old – some of the arguments and some of the rhetoric will seep into popular discourse as Darwinism continues on its rocky road to popular acceptance.

I have one odd criticism common to both books: neither satisfactorily answered the question implied by each author's subtitle. I never felt that Dennett gave a satisfactory answer to "what is the meaning of life?", a question apparently at the root of objections for many deniers of evolution by natural selection, a feeling that it leaves life without a reasons, a "meaning". Likewise with Dawkins, I never felt that he demonstrated that the "evidence of evolution" revealed a universe without design, although it's entirely consistent with that; rather that he showed how apparent design could grow through natural selection. But, in the end, these are small criticisms that don't limit or undermine the strength of the argument in either book.

I have one other minor complaint about Dawkins, a feeling that I once noted in reading Stephen Jay Gould: that his understanding of mathematics was not adequate for the tasks he would like to assign to it. At times Dawkins makes mathematically related statements that are not quite precise; at other times he could have expressed himself more succinctly with a better mathematical understanding. However, it's a minor issue that doesn't bear on his more-general arguments.

The Blind Watchmaker may not be the book that made Dawkins reputation since it was preceded by the famous – or notorious – The Selfish Gene, but it certainly cemented his reputation, and justifiably so. While at times he might not have been as accurate and thorough as I would have preferred, his writing is littered with stimulating ideas and valuable observations that deserve their audience.

This excerpt comes from a late chapter called "Doomed Rivals":

The obvious way to decide between rival theories is to examine the evidence. Lamarckian types of theory, for instance, are traditionally rejected – and rightly so – because no good evidence for them has ever been found (not for want of energetic trying, in some cases by zealots prepared to fake evidence ). In this chapter I shall take a different tack, largely because so many other books have examined the evidence and concluded in favour of Darwinism. Instead of examining the evidence for and against rival theories, I shall adopt a more armchair approach. My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life. If I am right it means that, even if there were no actual evidence in favour of the Darwinian theory (there is, of course) we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.

One way to dramatize this point is to make a prediction . I predict that, if a form of life is ever discovered in another part of the universe, however outlandish and weirdly alien that form of life may be in detail, it will be found to resemble life on Earth in one key respect: it will have evolved by some kind of Darwinian natural selection. Unfortunately , this is a prediction that we shall, in all probability, not be able to test in our lifetimes, but it remains a way of dramatizing an important truth about life on our own planet. The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life. I shall demonstrate this by discussing all known rival theories, not the evidence for or against them, but their adequacy in principle, as explanations for life.

First, I must specify what it means to 'explain' life. There are of course, many properties of living things that we could list, and some of them might be explicable by rival theories. Many facts about the distribution of protein molecules, as we have seen, may be due to neutral genetic mutations, rather than Darwinian selection. There is one particular property of living things, however, that I want to single out as explicable only by Darwinian selection. This property is the one that has been the recurring topic of this book: adaptive complexity. Living organisms are well fitted to survive and reproduce in their environments, in ways too numerous and statistically improbable to have come about in a single chance blow. Following Paley, I have used thee example of the eye. Two or three of an eye's well-'designed' features could, conceivably, have come about in a single lucky accident. It is the sheer number of interlocking parts, all well adapted to seeing and well adapted to each other, that demands a special kind of explanation beyond mere chance. The Darwinian explanation, of course, involves chance too, in the form of mutation. But the chance is filtered cumulatively by selection, step by step, over many generations. Other chapters have shown that this theory is capable of providing a satisfying explanation for adaptive complexity. In this chapter I shall argue that all other known theories are not capable of so doing. [pp. 287—288]

-- Notes by JNS