https://ift.tt/DAwZM35 https://1byte.io/articles/the-blind-watchmaker/
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When you think of Richard Dawkins, most people think of his first book.The Selfish Gene.. He later wrotethe Blind WatchmakerA look at some of the issues related to evolution from a different perspective, which I recently read and found equally interesting and important. Like The Selfish Gene, this book is older, with the first edition published in 1987, but the content hasn’t dated at all. Most of what you can get now is the 30th anniversary edition that came out in 2016, and the author says in the foreword that he found little that needed to be changed, and after reading it I have to agree.
The title of this book comes from a book calledthe watchmaker argumentof arguments in favor of the existence of a Creator. The general idea is that if you pick up a peculiar stone by the side of the road, despite its subtle texture or shape, you can believe that it was formed by chance through a natural process. After all, there are so many stones in the world, and there will always be some that will possess seemingly peculiar traits. But if you were to pick up a watch by the side of the road, you would not believe for a second that such a sophisticated object was the accidental result of a natural process, rather than the deliberate design of a watchmaker. Nature and life are far more complex than a watch, so it is even more unlikely that it was formed by chance and that a conscious and purposeful Creator must have existed. This argument first appeared in a book by the Englishman William Paley, but before him Newton, Descartes, and others believed that the workings of the universe were similar to those of a clock, that God was the clockmaker, and that what scientists discovered were only the rules designed by God. Reading this book reminded me that exactly 20 years ago my mentor and I went to a conference at Rutgers in the winter, and it was snowing hard on the way back to New Haven, so he had to drive slowly. For a couple of hours on the road we were talking about why religion attracts so many people, presumably because humans have a hard time understanding what natural evolutionary processes can produce in the interval of millions to hundreds of millions of years, and have to turn to the Creator to explain the existence of life.
When I first came to the United States, one of the things that surprised me the most was that there were states at the forefront of scientific and technological development that were debating whether or not evolution should be taught in primary and secondary schools, or whether or not creationism should be taught at the same time. It hasn’t really changed much until now, when one of the top issues in the US election is now women’s right to abortion, and the source of the opponents’ basis is religion rather than science and ethics. I have always thought that the influence of religion on education and society is at the top of the bear case in the US. In China religion is far from most people’s lives, and has even less influence on education, which is generally a positive thing. But because there is so little controversy and questioning, there is also a lack of meaningful discussion in popular culture. Most people simply accept evolution as fact, never considering the details of it, such as how a delicate and fragile organ like the eye was formed through the evolutionary process. Also the boundaries of species lie in the fact that individuals of the same species can produce offspring by mating with each other, and individuals of different species cannot produce healthy offspring with each other, so if different species evolved from a common ancestor, wouldn’t it be impossible for the new species to reproduce when they first diverged?
The book patiently and persuasively answers these detailed questions above, dismantling one by one the various skepticisms of evolution’s opponents. It is safe to say that after readingthe Selfish Gene和the Blind WatchmakerIt was only after that that I really understood evolution and natural selection and felt a sense of solidity and completeness about my knowledge in this area.