Modern Forager

I just finished The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins. Given the subtitle and having seen some of Dawkins speeches directly targeting religion, I expected a rather incendiary rant. Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised; apparently he’s become more vitriolic towards religion in the past couple decades after this book was written.

I found Dawkins’ discussion of the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution very interesting and he put forth a couple ideas that I’d never considered before, one way or the other. The book was essentially a discussion of how and why Darwinian evolution works and why Darwinian evolution is the only evolutionary theory yet postulated (two key words there) that can explain life as we know it. Dawkins explained all of his theories very well and used realistic enough examples - some made up, some not - that someone with the most rudimentary understanding of evolution could grasp them and come out with a new view on it.

All in all, I think this book can be used by pretty much everyone with an interest in evolution, be it an atheist, an evolution-believing Christian, an agnostic, or someone associated with any other religion. Really, only the Creationist wouldn’t find much use in the book. It wasn’t even until the last 2 or 3 pages of the book that he took aim at Creation Stories, whether they are Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or any other religion, and that was only after taking competing evolutionary theories to task, in much greater detail. It wasn’t even a fire-breathing “that’s just stupid” as I think Dawkins has perhaps become known for. He basically boiled it down to just replacing the complexity of the world with the complexity of a creator deity.

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Tags: Creation, evolution, Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker