The blind watchmaker

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The blind watchmaker: A new plea for Darwinism is a non-fiction book by the English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, originally published in English in 1986 and in German in 1987 . It was published again in 1996 by WW Norton & Company in New York under the title The Blind Watchmaker ( ISBN 0-393-31570-3 ). The German translation was published by Deutsches Taschenbuch Verlag Munich ( ISBN 3-423-11261-1 ). Dawkins explains and argues for the theory of evolution through the process of natural selection and responds to criticism of his earlier work The Selfish Gene .

With the title, Dawkins alludes to the watchmaker analogy , a teleological argument that was put forward in this form by William Paley , among others , and is used today by representatives of creationism and intelligent design . In his Natural Theology 1802, 50 years before Charles Darwin , Paley argues that a pocket watch found in the field would be recognized as an intelligently constructed object and that consequently living organisms should also be viewed as the works of an intelligent designer. Dawkins, on the other hand, explains how Charles Darwin's theory of evolution plausibly explains the existence of living things without the need for a creator god. He explains the difference between a completely random process and a process with random mutations and subsequent selection. This is explained by a sample program (the Wiesel program ) and the computer program The Blind Watchmaker was also available, which simulates the process of natural selection.

At the end of the book, Dawkins uses the fact that the complexity in nature can be explained by Darwin's theory of evolution as an argument against competing theories and states that there are no alternatives. From this he concludes that the existence of living beings can be explained without the acceptance of a god . While Paley saw an intelligent creator ("watchmaker") at work, Dawkins describes how evolutionary creativity ("watchmaker") results from the interaction of random ("blind") mutation and non-random natural selection.

In 1987 Richard Dawkins produced the BBC documentary The Blind Watchmaker , in which he explains the key points of his book.

literature

  • Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker. Why the findings of the theory of evolution show that the universe was not created by design (The blind watchmaker) . Dtv, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-423-34478-4 .
  • Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker . Penguin, London 1991, ISBN 0-14-014481-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. [1] Wiesel Program (weasel Program): Implementation in various programming languages
  2. Biomorph JavaScript Applet ( Memento of the original from March 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.well.com
  3. ^ The Blind Watchmaker in the Internet Movie Database