The Blind Watchmaker

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book goes deep on evolution and explains how evolution is not random but rather an unconciusly driven thing that shapes the creatues. Dawkins eloquently dismisses arguments that darwinian evolution is random and that complexity cannot arrive by small steps and explains how it happes.

🎨 Impressions

A bit of a hard read, in the sense that I felt it could be a bit dense. Else it was good and Dawkins writes superbly. Also, Dawkins beatiufully explains DNA and how it works.

How I Discovered It

I wanted to provoke Mohamad so i added a bunch of Dawkins to my reading list. No reason other than that.

Who Should Read It?

All who have a somewhat interested in the book. I think it is a bit of a hard swallow so should be careful not to start on this book when there are easier more accessesible books out there.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I think I got more from the book by understanding how the darwinian evolution works and how it arrives to the end-state we see today, rather than having an epinaphy about evolution.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• I had been warned to expect hostile questioning from fundamentalist listeners and I confess I was looking forward to destroying their arguments.

• It is rather implausibly said that Christian Doppler himself demonstrated his effect by hiring a brass band to play on an open railway truck as it rushed past his amazed audience. It is relative motion that matters, and as far as the Doppler Effect is concerned it doesn’t matter whether we consider the sound source to be moving past the ear, or the ear moving past the sound source.

• Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. Second, it just isn’t true that ‘each by itself is useless’. It isn’t true that the whole perfect work must have been achieved simultaneously. It isn’t true that each part is essential for the success of the whole. A simple, rudimentary, half-cocked eye/ear/echolocation system/cuckoo parasitism system, etc., is better than none at all. Without an eye you are totally blind.

• The theoretical importance of parasites would take too long to explain fully. Briefly, the problem with all ‘eugenic’ theories of female choice has always been as follows. If females really could successfully choose males with the best genes, their very success would reduce the range of choice available in the future: eventually, if there were only good genes around, there would be no point in choosing. Parasites remove this theoretical objection. The reason is that, according to Hamilton, parasites and hosts are running a never-ceasing cyclical arms race against one another. This in turn means that the ‘best’ genes in any one generation of birds are not the same as the best genes in future generations. What it takes to beat the current generation of parasites is no good against the next generation of evolving parasites.

• This belief, that Darwinian evolution is ‘random’, is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth. Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially nonrandom.

• ‘Dollo’s Law’ states that evolution is irreversible. This is often confused with a lot of idealistic nonsense about the inevitability of progress, often coupled with ignorant nonsense about evolution ‘violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics’ (those that belong to the half of the educated population that, according to the novelist C.P. Snow, know what the Second Law is, will realize that it is no more violated by evolution than it is violated by the growth of a baby).

• Dollo’s Law is really just a statement about the statistical improbability of following exactly the same evolutionary trajectory twice (or, indeed, any particular trajectory), in either direction. A single mutational step can easily be reversed.

• How good would each typist have to be, in order to match the DNA’s performance? The answer is almost too ludicrous to express. For what it is worth, every typist would have to have an error rate of about one in a trillion; that is, he would have to be accurate enough to make only a single error in typing the Bible 250,000 times at a stretch. A good secretary in real life has an error rate of about one per page. This is about half a billion times the error rate of the histone H4 gene.

• ‘It is widely accepted that some, perhaps many, of the abiotic chemical reactions and processes leading to the origin on Earth of replicating micro-organisms occurred very early in the history of Earth in close proximity to the surfaces of clay minerals and other inorganic substrates.’

• One reason for this is summarized in the Aesopian moral: The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life, while the fox is only running for his dinner.

• Darwin applied the idea of evolution in a discriminating way to living organisms changing in body form over countless generations. His successors have been tempted to see evolution in everything; in the changing form of the universe, in developmental ‘stages’ of human civilizations, in fashions in skirt lengths. Sometimes such analogies can be immensely fruitful, but it is easy to push analogies too far, and get overexcited by analogies that are so tenuous as to be unhelpful or even downright harmful.

• in the words of a kind reviewer of my own first book, ‘The reader is warned that he must put on his mental running shoes’.

• Comparisons between modern punctuationism on the one hand, and catastrophism or saltationism on the other, have a purely poetic force. They are, if I may coin a paradox, deeply superficial. They sound impressive in an artsy, literary way, but they do nothing to aid serious understanding, and they can give spurious aid and comfort to modern creationists in their disturbingly successful fight to subvert American education and textbook publishing.

• T. D. Lysenko was a second-rate agricultural plant breeder of no distinction other than in the field of politics. His anti-Mendelian fanaticism, and his fervent, dogmatic belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, would have been harmlessly ignored in most civilized countries. Unfortunately he happened to live in a country where ideology mattered more than scientific truth. In 1940 he was appointed director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Union, and he became immensely influential. His ignorant views on genetics became the only ones allowed to be taught in Soviet schools for a generation. Incalculable damage was done to Soviet agriculture. Many distinguished Soviet geneticists were banished, exiled or imprisoned. For example, N. I. Vavilov, a geneticist of worldwide reputation, died of malnutrition in a windowless prison cell after a prolonged trial on ludicrously trumped up charges such as ‘spying for the British’.