Customer Reviews

The Blind Watchmaker

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It astounds me how often Dawkins' detractors display a fundamental misunderstanding of his ideas. Dawkins never claimed at any point in "The Blind Watchmaker" that his software program of the same name constituted a perfect model of natural selection. It is a model of artifical selection, such as that which produced all the different modern varieties of dogs, and as such it demonstrates how selection acting on variation introduced by mutation can lead to increasing complexity and diversity. This it does admirably, even if there is nothing obviously "biological" about the biomorphs themselves. Dawkins can be forgiven his pride in his creation, I think.

A reviewer accused Dawkins of "never getting past" the arisal of a complete functional cell from nothing (the reviewer's words.) In fact Dawkins never made such a claim. Dawkins holds that life as we know it would have had to arise from a single self-replicating molecule, whose arisal is perhaps not overwhelmingly likely, but much more so than a complete cell.

The more I read into it, the more I believe that Darwinism is the only theory capable of explaining the complexity and diversity of life. I found the neo-Darwinian synthesis seductively easy to understand, staggeringly effective at explaining the way things are, and most of all, beautiful. My thanks to Dawkins for introducing me to it, if more through his books than through this software.

I actually read this book 5 years ago. It's a book full of imagination! Of the numerous scientific books I have ever read, this is the one that I will never forget. It evoked a series of mental images in my mind. Compare with many biology book burdened with citations and experimental data, this tiny book frequently provides fresh insights by using thought experiment in biological reasoning. I am looking forward to reading it again, with new surprse and definetely, enjoyment.

...Dawkins never claims his "biomorphs" to bebiological, their sole purpose is to show how small changes over aperiod of time can make huge changes in the end product; no more, noless. He turns trees (yes, just the shapes) into grasshoppers, and dragon flies, and satelites (yes, satelites, which are never claimed to be biological). His "quasi-biological forms" (see the forms?) do an excellent job of making his point, and you shall never convince this 'skeptic' otherwise.

I can just see hundreds of nerds transfixed behind their computerscreen googling over the one thing coming from another thing. All you need is a piece of paper and a pencil, and you can do the same thing. Dawkins does not use the computer well, neither does he explain his use well. A small change in a program, can give dramatic differences, a large change can give insignificant differences. There is no rule of small steppiness involved here, much as Dawkins likes to twist the regular meaning of words to have it be so. Also Dawkins has failed to simulate intelligence in the program. Much as Darwinists like to deny intelligent design, simulated intelligence is actually required for any lifelike computerprogram. That means a sophisticated use of the computer's randomizer function. In the computerenvironment only the randomizer has the power of decision. The rest of it works in a preordained fashion so to speak, one would get the same results over and over, if not using the randomizer function. Alternatively a sophisticated use of the computerclock would also work, if the clock strikes irregularly. Dawkins has cheated, because he has introduced symetry in the program. All the forms would look awful without symetry, all the forms just reflect the lifelike nature of symetry. If you buy this, you would support turning science into a commercial enterprise, and deny peer-review.

Perhaps this quote from Richard Milton will suffice to demonstrate the blind faith espoused in this book:

"Dawkins not only calls his computer drawings 'biomorphs', he gives some of them the names of living creatures. He also refers to them as 'quasi-biological' forms and in a moment of excitement calls them 'exquisite creatures'. He plainly believes that in some way they correspond to the real world of living animals and insects.

"Why is this an example of pseudoscience?

"In reality, the biomorphs do not correspond in any way at all with living things, except in the purely trivial way that Dawkins sees some resemblance in their shapes. The only thing about the 'biomorphs' that is biological is Richard Dawkins, their creator. ...

"The program he wrote and the computer he used have no analog at all in the real biological world. Indeed, if he set out to create an experiment that simulates evolution, he has only succeeded in making one that simulates special creation, with himself in the omnipotent role.

"His program is not a true representation of random mutation coupled with natural selection. On the contrary it is dependent on artificial selection in which he controls the rate of occurrence of mutations. Despite Dawkins's own imaginative interpretations, and even with the deck stacked in his favour, his biomorphs show no real novelty arising -- no cases of bears turning into whales.

"Most important of all, it is Dawkins, not blind fate, who chooses which are the lucky individuals to receive the next mutation and of course he chooses the most promising ones ('I began to breed ... from whichever child looked most like an insect.') That is why they have ended up looking like recognizable images from his memory. If his mutations really occurred randomly, as in the real world, Dawkins would still be sitting in front of his screen watching a small dot and waiting for it do something."

Does a Sighted Watchmaker exist? The difference with me is: I really don't care one way or another. But it happens that the evidence supports his existence.

The problem with Dawkinism, of course, is described by Behe: we humans tend to think that the contents of "black boxes" are simple: imagining that a system as complex as the first living cell could arise complete, by accident, for example. Dawkinists dare not go any further, as it would imperil their beliefs. But I don't have as much faith.