The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of my mentors once suggested that I read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. Within the next hour, I had bought the e-book and started reading it. And then I hit a wall.
I couldn’t make my way through even the first few paragraphs. I tried again a month later. Then again after some more time. But every attempt ended the same way—I simply couldn’t get my head around what I was reading. Eventually, the book went into hibernation.
But something struck me: perhaps I didn’t know enough Darwinism to understand The Moral Animal?
So, on another day, I asked AI a very specific question: What is the best book to learn Darwinism from—a book that would give me a solid enough foundation to make reading The Moral Animal easier?
After quite a bit of back-and-forth, the answer was The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Three months (the longest I ever took to finish a book) later, I am comfortably reading The Moral Animal.
That, by itself, tells you something about what The Blind Watchmaker has done for me.
I wish Dawkins had included a short primer at the outset on the basic biological concepts needed to understand this book. It could have been just four or five pages, but it would have made the journey considerably easier for a reader who, like me, doesn’t have a strong grounding in biology.
That said, The Blind Watchmaker gives you an extraordinarily zoomed-out view of life—and of the Darwinian philosophy that explains so much of it. Dawkins takes the seemingly simple idea of natural selection and shows its astonishing power to explain the complexity and apparent design we see in living organisms.
The book is, in many ways, a journey through the evolution of the animal kingdom. To explain evolution over millions of years, Dawkins takes us through fascinating subjects along the way: Wegener’s Pangaea, the separation of continents, placental and marsupial mammals, and the evolution of the incredibly complicated systems found in animals. These stories make the book much more than an extended argument for Darwinism.
One concept I particularly enjoyed was convergent evolution—the remarkable phenomenon in which very different species, living in very different parts of the world, independently evolve remarkably similar features because those features happen to be effective solutions to similar problems. It is almost as if evolution keeps rediscovering good designs.
The book also changed how I visualize the evolutionary tree. We tend to imagine a dense, flourishing tree of life, with branches everywhere. But natural selection has left behind an enormous number of gaps. Most evolutionary experiments disappeared. Of all the branches that once existed, only a tiny fraction survive today—and an even smaller fraction are known to us.
What makes the book particularly valuable is that Dawkins isn’t merely giving us the dots of evolutionary knowledge. Many of those dots are things we may already know, at least vaguely. His real contribution is showing us how the dots are connected. He reveals the mechanisms and patterns behind Darwinism that we may never have appreciated, and in doing so makes the whole theory seem both more powerful and more beautiful.
And this is where the book becomes useful beyond evolution. Dawkins repeatedly demonstrates how to question an established theory—or one you are proposing yourself—and how to construct a rational argument from evidence. At times, he even resorts to what amounts to back-of-the-envelope calculations to test whether an argument is plausible. That is a valuable intellectual habit regardless of the subject.
Another idea I found surprisingly transferable was his caution about using analogies. A fruitful analogy can help us discover something genuinely new; a bad analogy can send our thinking in the wrong direction and create confusion.
I also enjoyed the way Dawkins reduces the phenomenon of evolution to the elegant abstraction of replicators. Once you see evolution through that lens, the concept becomes a pattern that can potentially be applied—at least partially—to problems far beyond biology.
Interestingly, as the book progressed, questions kept occurring to me about things Dawkins hadn’t yet discussed. And then, almost as if he had anticipated them, they would eventually appear: sexual reproduction, alternative theories such as Lamarckism, taxonomy, and its relationship with evolution. That made the reading feel like an extended conversation with the author.
My one criticism is that the book could have been considerably shorter. Dawkins often takes long detours to establish his arguments. I don’t deny that these details are fascinating, but because the book is fundamentally a work of logical analysis, it can sometimes become difficult to hold the central argument in your head while following these extended diversions. At the same time, I can understand why this happens: when someone has as many interconnected ideas in his head as Dawkins clearly does and has a daunting task to silence the critics of Darwinism, staying rigidly on one narrow path must be extraordinarily difficult.
There is also an important caveat for me. This book provides perhaps one of the most zoomed-out perspectives on who we are and how life came to be—but Darwinism is not the only level at which we can understand ourselves. We still have to live in the present. We can zoom in again and use other philosophies and frameworks to understand how we should actually live our lives. One abstraction does not invalidate the others.
The Blind Watchmaker has become a master key to several doors leading into the vast body of knowledge built upon Darwin’s theory of natural selection.** Dawkins himself points the reader toward many of those doors, mentioning books such as Helena Cronin’s The Ant and the Peacock, Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen and Evolution, Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, and the work on Darwinian medicine by Randolph Nesse and George Williams.
And while the genius belongs fundamentally to Charles Darwin, Dawkins deserves enormous credit for taking Darwin’s profound but deceptively simple insight and making its magnanimity visible to the modern reader.
A fascinating book—not always an easy one—but one that teaches you not only about evolution, but also about how to think.
