Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1476763 in Books
• Published on: 1996
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.23" h x 5.56" w x 8.26" l, .97 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

From Amazon.com
Richard Dawkins is not a shy man. Edward Larson's research shows that most scientists today are not formally religious, but Dawkins is an in-your-face atheist in the witty British style:

I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence.

The title of this 1986 work, Dawkins's second book, refers to the Rev. William Paley's 1802 work, Natural Theology, which argued that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Not so, says Dawkins: "All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way... it is the blind watchmaker."

Dawkins is a hard-core scientist: he doesn't just tell you what is so, he shows you how to find out for yourself. For this book, he wrote Biomorph, one of the first artificial life programs. You can check Dawkins's results on your own Mac or PC.

Bill Bryson, in I'm a Stranger Here Myself, published by Broadway Books, 1999
According to Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, each one of the ten trillion cells in the human body contains more genetic information than the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica (and without sending a salesman to your door), yet it appears that 90 percent of all our genetic material doesn't do anything at all. It just sits there, like Uncle Fred and Aunt Mabel when they drop by on a Sunday.

Ingram
Patiently and lucidly, this Los Angeles Times Book Award and Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize winner identifies the aspects of the theory of evolution that people find hard to believe and removes the barriers to credibility one by one. "As readable and vigorous a defense of Darwinism as has been published since 1859."--The Economist.