Essay examples --

The Blind Watchmaker In 1986, Richard Dawkins, an eminent ethologist and evolutionary biologist, published a three-hundred-plus page refutation of William Paley’s watchmaker analogy. The writing itself is thorough, elegant, and forceful. Dawkins possesses what is possibly the most blunt yet poetic scientific writing style that exists, sometimes even quoting pieces of poetry and literature in his writings. While previous works such as The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor’s Tale were scientific masterpieces unto themselves, the insights contained in The Blind Watchmaker are among some of the most important and impressive ever offered by a human being. In writing this paper, it was difficult to decide exactly what to highlight; the book itself is dense, although that’s not necessarily a hindrance to its effectiveness. A good place to start would probably be Paley’s watchmaker analogy itself. To paraphrase, Paley asks you to imagine stubbing your toe in the middle of a grassy field. If you asked yourself how the stone got there, you might just assume it had always been there. However, if you were to stumble upon a watch in that same field, you would not assume the same. You would suppose that at some point in time, a watchmaker designed and created it for a purpose. Paley goes on to explain that â€Å"every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature† (Dawkins 5). To strengthen his argument, life is immensely more complex than a watch. The crux of Paley’s argument was the eye, and in his work Natural Theology he compares it to the man -made telescope. On its face, this appears to be a strong, scathing argument against the natural appearance of life, but the analogy begins... ...rking on randomly mutating, self-replicating creatures in order to create the variety and abundance of life on our planet is surely one of the greatest revelations mankind has ever produced. Chemistry and physics alone are capable of colluding and eventually creating not just life, but sentience, intelligence - no divine nudge necessary. That’s not to say that this idea is entirely original to Dawkins (David Hume was capable of constructing an argument against design by only philosophizing), but that doesn’t diminish the accomplishment this book represents. While many freethinkers out there disagree with his tactics and approach as a proselytizing atheist, he’s certainly earned a level of frustration. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins has done all the footwork for us already. We need only open its pages and utilize the relatively large brains that nature has given us.