#blind watchmaker

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself—and that is what it is when it dies—the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings… More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

The Concept of The Blind Watchmaker

Book review 5) The Blind Watchmaker

Designing Nature - The Design Argument

Evolution, presumably, occurred through the normal operation of natural laws. But this was only possible, as I shall argue in the next chapters, because the laws of nature are themselves quite special. The biologist Richard Dawkins, referring to William Paley's "watch argument," calls the universe the "Blind Watchmaker." The "watches," for Dawkins, are the intricate structures of living things. The universe, mindlessly following its mechanical laws, has succeeded in crafting these astonishing structures by repeated trial and error. What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his Blind Watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley's watches. Paley finds a "watch" and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?