TM

The Blind Watchmaker

Rating

8/10 Dawkins just knows how to write easy-to-read, conversational, yet information-packed prose. Because I watched a couple of his debates in the past, I had a private Richard Dawkins voice playing inside my head as I was reading this book - strange but enjoyable experience; especially during the parts where he is picking a fight against some of the evolutionary deniers (but more on that later).

The book itself deserves a solid 8 - it’s a wonderful deep dive into anything you can think of when it comes to Darwinian evolution and its ability to create highly sophisticated natural devices like eyes, lungs, muscles, or echolocations. It’s full of examples and heavy on repetition of the key facts, which helps with retention and deep understanding of how and why natural selection is the only theory that can reliably explain the existence of complex living machinery. My light critique, and why I am not going above 8/10, is the unnecessary amount of argumentation against people who deny Darwinism or who have opposing points of view. I agree that it is valuable to read what other potential theorists have in mind and then see why they are wrong and natural selection is the best explanation. But Dawkins often mentions specific people, their articles and books, which makes the arguments come across as somewhat personal and unnecessarily direct. Enjoyable if you like some drama, but a bit exhausting when it’s page 350, and he is fighting the 7th person that, according to him, is getting way too much attention to their silly ideas. That said, I wanted to learn more about evolution and how crazy complex organs came to be - and on that topic, the book exceeded my expectations.

Synopsis

I’ll use a quote from the book:

“This book is mainly about evolution as the solution of the complex ‘design’ that Paley thought proved the existence of a divine watchmaker.” … “it strings a series of acceptably lucky events (random mutations) together in a nonrandom sequence so that, at the end of the sequence, the finished product carries the illusion of being very very lucky indeed, far too improbable to have come about by chance alone.”

William Paley wrote the Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity where he used the analogy of a “divine watchmaker” that Dawkins transformed into the “blind watchmaker”.

Notes

  • the entire idea of complex design emerging from the Darwinian theory of evolution stems from the premise that natural selection is non-random and its existence results in a cumulative chain of improvements that help the next generation of species to survive longer, reproduce and pass on their genes
  • thus any extremely complex natural device like an eye or a heart is the result of thousands of tiny random mutations that at each stage of the evolution gave the lucky individual a survival advantage and thus the genes connected to this improvement propagated forward through time
  • this theory for the explanation of complex design works only because we know that there are millions of years to work with in which all of the complex machinery could emerge from primordial soup by tiny step by step improvements that culminated in what we see around us (an use inside of us) today
  • “Cumulative selection, … , is an efficient searching procedure, and its consequences look very like creative intelligence.” - cumulative selection searches the space of all possible creatures by selecting those that posses genes that give them some survival advantage
  • “The actual animals that have ever lived on Earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist.” - and even tinier subset of all potential gene combinations that would result in non-functional tissue. It’s very interesting to think about life in this way because it makes you wonder what are all the possibilities that result in functioning animals. How many weird shapes and organs are theoretically possible and how many have actually evolved. And it also gives you a perspective on how unlikely anything complex is without a force like cumulative natural selection. So maybe we truly are alone in this universe…
  • “The shape and behavior of a cell depend upon which genes inside that cell are being read and translated into their protein products. This in turn depends on the chemicals already in the cell, which depends partly on which genes have previously been read in the cell, and partly on neighbouring cells.” - so what happens in each cell of our body is a beautiful causal mess!
  • “DNA’s performance as an archival medium is spectacular. In its capacity to preserve a message it far outdoes tablets of stone.” and “A conservative estimate is that, in the absence of natural selection, DNA replicates so accurately that it takes five million replication generations to miscopy 1 per cent of the characters.” - clearly the replication process itself has undergone millennia of cumulative selection. It’s meta!
  • “The slowest-evolving molecules, like histones, turn out to be the ones that have been most subject to natural selection.” - this is counterintuitive at first but very obvious on a second thought. Of course if a molecule nowadays has high mutation rate, its mutant variants are still totally capable of doing the job that they should in our bodies. Natural selection thus doesn’t prefer one of the specific mutations and allows individuals with different mutations to pass on their genes. But if a molecular mutation results in a survival disadvantage, it is quickly excluded from the gene pool and only those molecules that tend to mutate less will be passed on. Thus the molecules with very low mutation rates are the ones where mutations posed some disadvantage or disfunction, and over the millennia, natural selection favored their slow-evolving variants.
  • “The mutation rate is bound to place an upper limit on the rate at which evolution can proceed.”
  • The vital ingredient for a planet to become alive is the property of self-replication. “There must somehow, as a consequence of the ordinary laws of physics, come into being a self-copying entities, or, as I shall call them, replicators.” - on Earth, this is DNA and RNA.
  • “And if any entity, anywhere in the universe, happens to have the property of being good at making more copies of itself, then automatically more and more copies of that entity will obviously come into existence. Not only that but, since they automatically form lineages and are occasionally miscopied, later versions tend to be better at making copies of themselves than earlier versions, because of the powerful processes of cumulative selection. It is all utterly simple and automatic. It is so predictable as to be almost inevitable.” - it’s beautiful, it fills me with wonder about whether we are truly alone in this universe or not.
  • “Given infinite time, or infinite opportunities, anything is possible. The large numbers of proverbially furnished by astronomy, and the large timespans characteristic of geology, combine to turn topsy_turvy our everyday estimates of what is expected and what is miraculous.” - which helps with explaining how a very simple primitive life could emerge out of a hot mix of water, sand and some lightning - or out of crystals forming in puddles and streams (the Clay Hypothesis).
  • “Each gene is selected for its capacity to cooperate successfully with the population of other genes that it is likely to meet in bodies.”
  • Apparently cells are classified into 210 different kinds - it would be cool to create a cell map
  • “A sexually reproducing species can be thought of as a device that permutes a discrete set of mutually accustomed genes in different combinations.” - if this isn’t beautiful then I don’t know what is!
  • Runaway evolution, or quick burst of evolution, happen where two species compete against each other or for the same resource. Their evolution becomes an arms race against each other where an improvement in one species essentially feeds on itself by the evolutionary response in their competitor. What’s interesting is that this often doesn’t change the levels of accomplishment in one or the other species - they both improve their design but they improve it equally so no one side comes out on top.
  • “The idea of genes failing to express themselves is not a difficult one. If a man has genes for a long penis, he is just as likely to pass those genes on to his daughter as to his son. His son may express those genes whereas his daughter, of course, will not, because she doesn’t have a penis at all. But if the man eventually gets grandsons, the sons of his daughter may be just as likely to inherit his long penis as the sons of his son.”
  • Another nice property of natural selection and sexual reproduction is that genes do not mix in individuals complete freely but instead mix in related clusters. One reason for this stems from the female preference for specific traits in males. Female birds that prefer a long tail in their males are more likely to mate with a male that has a long tail. Their offsprings will thus carry both the genes for long tails in males and genes for long-tail preference in females. This creates a certain togetherness of these genes that will either tend to be present in the individual together or not at all.
  • It’s entirely possible, probably even likely, that evolutionary change due to natural selection is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the change most likely happens at random on the molecular level and in magnitude it is greater than the cumulative process of specie’s improvement to survive and flourish.
  • “Mutations are caused by definite physical events; they don’t just spontaneously happen. They are induced by so-called mutagens: X-rays, cosmic rays, radioactive substances, various chemicals, and even other genes called mutator genes.”
  • Also, not all genes in any species are equally likely to mutate. In fact, every part of the chromosome has its own mutation rate under normal conditions (in absence of an excess of mutagens).
  • “Wings, or anything else, can only evolve if the process of development allows them to. Nothing magically sprouts. It has to be made by the processes of embryonic development. Only a minority of the things that conceivably could evolve are actually permitted by the status quo of existing developmental processes.” - a snake can evolve an extra vertebra, that’s how snakes got their length, but it cannot grow wings out of nowhere, it’s developmental molecular chemistry and physics do not allow it that possibility.
  • And the final note that just pinpoints how beautifully Dawkins can write about science: “The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. Whatever is the explanation for life, therefore, it cannot be chance. The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance. The antithesis of chance is nonrandom survival…“