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Topic: The Blind Watchmaker

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	Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker
		A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye.
		Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.
		Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.
	www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk /dawkins/writings/blindwatchmaker.shtml (1219 words)

	NationMaster.com - Encyclopedia: The Blind Watchmaker
		Evolution of the blind watchmaker sort is necessarily a very gradual process, because the blind watchmaker has to be able to produce complex organs reliably, time after time,without resorting to magic.
		The blind watchmaker thesis is not necessarily the same thing as "evolution," a fact which has caused enormous confusion.
		Darwinists get very indignant when their blind watchmaker is described as "mere chance." According to Dawkins, "natural selection is the very opposite of random." [6] That would be true if the effects of natural selection were predictable, but it is axiomatic in Darwinian circles that they are not predictable.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/The-Blind-Watchmaker (1491 words)

	The Blind Watchmaker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design is a 1986 book by Richard Dawkins in which he presents an explanation of, and argument for, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
		In developing his argument that natural selection can explain the complex adaptations of organisms, Dawkins' first concern is to illustrate the difference between the potential for the development of complexity of pure randomness as opposed to that of randomness coupled with cumulative selection.
		Dawkins then describes his experiences with a more sophisticated computer model of artificial selection implemented in a program also called The Blind Watchmaker, which was sold separately as a teaching aid.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker (491 words)

	Watchmaker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Historically, in England, watchmakers would have to undergo a seven year apprenticeship and then join a guild, such as the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in London, before selling their first watch.
		William Paley and others used the watchmaker in his famous analogy to infer for the existence of God (the teleological argument).
		Richard Dawkins later applied this analogy in his book The Blind Watchmaker, arguing that evolution is blind in that it cannot look forward and is random.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Watchmaker (195 words)

	II. The Blind Watchmaker Thesis
		Evolution of the blind watchmaker sort is necessarily a very gradual process, because the blind watchmaker has to be able to produce complex organs reliably, time after time, without resorting to magic.
		If the blind watchmaker thesis is supported by overwhelming evidence we may have to accept it, like it or not, and either become atheists or make our peace with God as best we can.
		When the blind watchmaker thesis is discarded,we are left with something like this: Living things are united by a common genetic code, grouped within taxonomic categories of greater and lesser similarity.
	www.apologetics.org /articles/founder2.html (4861 words)

	Creator or Blind Watchmaker?(First Things): Johnson, Phillip
		He wrote The Blind Watchmaker to convince the public of something that Darwinists take for granted: namely, that the appearance of purposeful design in biology is misleading, because all living organisms, including ourselves, are the products of a natural evolutionary process employing random variation and natural selection.
		The blind watchmaker hypothesis is therefore merely a way of stating the commitment of "science" to naturalism, and as such the existence of a blind watchmaker is a logical necessity.
		That a competent blind watchmaker doesn't exist at all is not a logical possibility.
	www.arn.org /docs/johnson/cre_bw98.htm (5129 words)

	NationMaster.com - Encyclopedia: Watchmaker
		Cover The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design is a 1986 book by Richard Dawkins in which he presents an explanation of, and argument for, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
		The Watchmaker analogy was anticipated by Cicero in De natura deorum, (About the nature of the gods), ii.
		Critics of the watchmaker analogy, feel that an intelligent designer would not have created such poor designs unless the "designer" was inept or sadistic.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Watchmaker (820 words)

	The Religion of the Blind Watchmaker
		The blind watchmaker thesis has enormous religious significance because it purports to explain the history of life without leaving any role to a supernatural Creator.
		The subject in controversy, however, is my argument that the blind watchmaker thesis is not supported by the evidence-i.e., that science does not know how life could have evolved to its present complexity and diversity without the participation of preexisting intelligence.
		From that standpoint the blind watchmaker thesis is true in principle by definition.
	www.origins.org /articles/johnson_blindwatchmaker.html (2666 words)

	Phillip E. Johnson June 29, 1992 The Religion of the Blind Watchmaker [Stephen Jay Gould p
		The blind watchmaker thesis has enormous religious significance because it purports to explain the history of life without leaving any role to a supernatural creator.
		The subject in controversy, however, is my argument that the blind watchmaker thesis is not supported by the evidence -- i.e., that science does not know how life could have evolved to its present complexity and diversity without the participation of preexisting intelligence.
		From that standpoint the blind watchmaker thesis is true in principle by definition.
	www.skepticfiles.org /evolut/bwmakerp.htm (1975 words)

	The Blind Watchmaker (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		BLIND FAITH: HYDE PARK 1969 ** E BLIND** Faith were the Sixties supergroup that never quite made it.
		Blind Faith's debut concert was in front of a cool 100,000 people on a warm day in Hyde Park.
		Capturing the soul and beer-swilling of a southern summer bbq, West Virginia's American Minor have blended the swagger and blues-obsessed soul of the stadium rock bands of the '70s with the grit of a seedy...
	www.serebella.com /encyclopedia/article-The_Blind_Watchmaker.html (1086 words)

	The blind watchmaker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Start the The blind watchmaker article or add a request for it.
		Look for The blind watchmaker in Wiktionary, our sister dictionary project.
		Look for The blind watchmaker in the Commons, our repository for free images, music, sound, and video.
	www.sciencedaily.com /encyclopedia/the_blind_watchmaker (155 words)

	The Blind Watchmaker (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Yet living organisms, which are far more complex than watches, should need a vastly more powerful watchmaker, not the blind forces of Darwin's evolutionary theory.
		This process of natural selection is the "blind watchmaker" of the title, crafting fit organisms with no plan, no view for the future and no mechanisms more sophisticated than random variation and differential survival.
		Thus, the blind watchmaker makes mistakes, and these mistakes are very telling.
	www.branta.demon.co.uk /alien-design/tbw.htm (653 words)

	Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design - Richard Dawkins (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		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.
		The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who made one of the most famous creationist arguments: Just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed.
		If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
	www.bookfinder.us /review9/0393315703.html (748 words)

	Dawkins, Richard - The Blind Watchmaker : Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design book review
		In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins delves into the mechanism of cumulative natural selection--unlike Tim Berra's Evolution and the Myth of Creationism which goes into many of the other scientific areas involved in organic evolution such as paleontology.
		The watchmaker argument is the basis from which Dawkins begins.
		The Blind Watchmaker is the type of book that you can explore several times and still pull additional useful information out of on the second and third reads that you missed the first time through.
	www.2think.org /tbw.shtml (554 words)

	[No title]
		The notion of a "watchmaker" as creator is taken from the observation by the seventeenth-century theologian William Paley that, just as complex manufactured objects like watches require a watchmaker to account for their existence, so too must living things owe their much greater complexity to a divine artisan.
		You have now seen most of the major features of this BLIND WATCHMAKER software, but you may be interested in investigating some of the other options available through the pull-down menus.
		Quitting the BLIND WATCHMAKER To exit from WATCHMAK, either pull down the "Biomorphs" menu and select "Quit," or point to the square at the top left corner of the screen and either click a mouse button or hit the ALT key or the Space bar.
	www.anselm.edu /homepage/dbanach/bwhelp.htm (3015 words)

	Dallas Willard ARTICLES
		Natural selection is, according to Dawkins, "the blind watchmaker" (5, 37)--"blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view" (21)--and this first stage of the argument is supposed to show that the watchmaker (really, the speciesmaker) is indeed blind.
		As a result, when he says, "The basic idea of The Blind Watchmaker is that we don't need to postulate a designer in order to understand life, or anything else in the universe" (147; my italics), he has a "basic idea" that is nothing more that just bald assertion.
		When he writes books like The Blind Watchmaker he is just a naturalist metaphysician, trying to cozy up to the scientists and blend into their company in such a way that his true colors will not be noticed.
	www.dwillard.org /articles/artview.asp?artID=52 (6093 words)

	Introduction to Biomorphs, Dawkins and the blind watchmaker.
		Introduction to Biomorphs, Dawkins and the blind watchmaker.
		Nevertheless it is, by far, the most fertile, and probably the closest to the historical reality, of the theories proposed to explain life complexity.
		The third chapter of the blind watchmaker is dedicated to the biomorph program developed by Dawkins that points out the power of micro-mutations and cumulative selection.
	www.rennard.org /alife/english/biomintrgb.html (1530 words)

	Blind Watchmaker - Christian-Faith.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Richard Dawkins began The Blind Watchmaker, his influential restatement of Darwinism, with the observation that "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." May we consider the possibility that living organisms give that appearance because they actually were designed?
		Biochemist Michael Behe answers that the blind watchmaker thesis is a relic of a nineteenth century science which lacked the understanding of biological mechanisms that recent advances in molecular biology have provided.
		If the blind watchmaker thesis is true, there must be a gradually ascending staircase from the base all the way to the summit.
	www.christian-faith.com /html/page/blind_watchmaker (2600 words)

	Blind Watchmaker, the - Richard Dawkins - Printed Books Shopping at dooyoo.co.uk
		Only this man was Darwin and the birds he was “eyeing up” were a number of species of finches whose main distinguishing features were the sizes and shapes of their beaks.
		Blind Watchmaker, the - Richard Dawkins : A passionate thesis
		Blind Watchmaker, the - Richard Dawkins : Science for Non-Geeks
	www.dooyoo.co.uk /printed-books/blind-watchmaker-the-richard-dawkins (338 words)

	New Scientist Breaking News - Chemistry guides evolution, claims theory (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		That enduring metaphor for the randomness of evolution, a blind watchmaker that works to no pattern or design, is being challenged by two European chemists.
		They say that the watchmaker may have been blind, but was guided and constrained by the changing chemistry of the environment, with many inevitable results.
		The metaphor of the blind watchmaker has been famously championed by Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford.
	www.newscientist.com /article.ns?id=dn3267 (712 words)

	My Tryst with the Blind Watchmaker
		In his mouth, the watchmaker holds a betel nut and the red juice stains his lips and leaks across the side of his chin.
		But our watchmaker is blind and his explanation is that the arranging was really done by the forces of physics, in this case the action of wind.
		It is blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences and its impact on living things is almost unconscious.
	serendip.brynmawr.edu /sci_cult/evolit/s05/web1/abose.html (1162 words)

	The Religion of the Blind Watchmaker: Johnson, Phillip
		This "blind watchmaker thesis" is the most important claim of evolutionary biology.
		God as a remote First Cause thus remains a possibility, but God as an active creator is absolutely ruled out by the blind watchmaker thesis.
		The subject in controversy, however, is my argument that the blind watchmaker thesis is not supported by the evidence-i.e., that science does not know how life could have evolved to its present complexity and diversity without the participation of preexisting intelligence.
	www.arn.org /docs/johnson/watchmkr.htm (2693 words)

	SeniorEssays
		Evolution cannot be the process of blind chance, or we cannot accept it as an explanation for nature's complexity.
		In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins admits that "modern heredity is based on DNA code, which is itself far too complicated to have sprung spontaneously into being by a single act of chance."
		In this model, Dawkins is the watchmaker of his biomorphs, so again he does not escape the problem he is trying to solve.
	www.sewanee.edu /Philosophy/Capstone/2000/hoffman.html (9821 words)

	SPAsoft - Blind Watchmaker (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		With Blind Watchmaker from SPA, it really is a case of 'You've read the book, now see the software.' Based on Richard Dawkins brilliant exposition of the same name, it admirably illustrates the points made by Professor Dawkins in his book and, indeed, is a companion to it.
		Blind Watchmaker adds a whole new dimension to the study of evolution and genetics.
		Blind Watchmaker is easy to learn and use.
	www.spasoft.co.uk /blindwatch_reviews.html (224 words)

	COSI 113 Blind Watchmaker (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Since this first example is not governed by a blind watchmaker, and not really similar to a real world evolution, the author moves on to the Biomorphs experiment.
		Even though the watchmaker is still not "very blind", it still has some degree of "blindness", since a long term goal does not necessarily determine the same series of mutations, as the author argues it was the case in his biomorph universe.
		From that standpoint the blind watchmaker thesis is true in principle by definition...Science may not know all the details yet, but something very much like Darwinian evolution simply has to be responsible for our existence because there is no acceptable alternative.
	www.cs.brandeis.edu /~cs113/classprojects/~eketri/cs113/proj1.html (1442 words)

	Amazon.ca: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design: Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		The "Blind Watchmaker" of this book refers to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
		For, the watch is an intricate piece of machinery that surely requires a watchmaker to piece together all it's inner workings.
		Blind in the sense that evolution has no direction, no goals, and no predetermined stopping point.
	www.amazon.ca /exec/obidos/ASIN/0393315703 (1375 words)

	Blind Watchmaker Applet
		The Blind Watchmaker algorithm was conceived by Richard Dawkins and is described in his book The Blind Watchmaker.
		The Blind Watchmaker applet is easy to use and demonstrates very effectively how random mutation followed by non-random selection can lead to interesting, complex forms.
		In addition, genes to specify the colour and control the segmentation of the Biomorphs are included in the Blind Watchmaker Applet.
	suhep.phy.syr.edu /courses/mirror/biomorph (331 words)

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