The Blind Watchmaker: Why The Evidence Of Evolution Reveals A Universe Without Design Quotes
"We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe."
"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."
"Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design."
"Words are our servants, not our masters."
"Our brains were designed to understand hunting and gathering, mating and child-rearing: a world of medium-sized objects moving in three dimensions at moderate speeds."
"Nobody has yet invented the mathematics for describing the total structure and behaviour of such an object as a physicist, or even of one of his cells."
"We wanted to know why we, and all other complicated things, exist."
"Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view."
"The systematic putting together of parts to a purposeful design is something we know and understand, for we have experienced it at first hand."
"The true explanation is utterly different, and it had to wait for one of the most revolutionary thinkers of all time, Charles Darwin."
"The only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way."
"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."
"The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false."
"Reductionism, in this sense, is just another name for an honest desire to understand how things work."
"The odds against the random occurrence of such a series of coincidences are, as we have already stated, astronomical."
"Without an eye you are totally blind. With half an eye you may at least be able to detect the general direction of a predator’s movement, even if you can’t focus a clear image."
"Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random."
"Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance."
"The waves and the pebbles together constitute a simple example of a system that automatically generates non-randomness."
"Sieving of this order of simplicity is not, on its own, enough to account for the massive amounts of nonrandom order that we see in living things."
"The essential difference between single-step selection and cumulative selection is this."
"In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success."
"It is not unlikely that, without glasses, your vision is a misty blur. One of today’s most distinguished evolutionary theorists so seldom cleans his glasses that his vision is probably a misty blur anyway, but he seems to get along pretty well."
"What matters is the difference between the time taken by cumulative selection, and the time which the same computer, working flat out at the same rate, would take to reach the target phrase if it were forced to use the other procedure of single-step selection."
"Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially _non_random."
"There is no mechanism whereby clouds of particular shapes can spawn daughter clouds resembling themselves."
"The ‘watchmaker’ that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has no long-term goal."
"Provided the difference between the modern eye and its immediate predecessor X is sufficiently small, provided, in other words, that they are sufficiently close to one another in the space of all possible structures."
"It seems to me at least as likely that it used it for 5 per cent vision."
"The claim that ‘The eye either functions as a whole, or not at all’ turns out to be, not merely false but self-evidently false to anybody who thinks for 2 seconds about his own familiar experience."
"Each step in the series, however small (or large) the step, would be an optical improvement."
"A pinhole camera forms a definite image, the smaller the pinhole the sharper (but dimmer) the image, the larger the pinhole the brighter (but fuzzier) the image."
"What is worrying about Nautilus is that the quality of its retina suggests that it would really benefit, greatly and immediately, from a lens."
"Anti-evolution propaganda is full of alleged examples of complex systems that ‘could not possibly’ have passed through a gradual series of intermediates."
"It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs; it’s raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms."
"The DNA content must be a small proportion of the total, so why did I say that it was raining DNA rather than cellulose? The answer is that it is the DNA that matters."
"There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over."
"The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA."
"All body cells contain the same genes, it might seem surprising that all body cells aren’t the same as each other."
"The final shape of the whole body, the size of its limbs, the wiring up of its brain, the timing of its behaviour patterns, are all the indirect consequences of interactions between different kinds of cells."
"DNA is also transmitted sideways or horizontally: to DNA in non-germ-line cells such as liver cells or skin cells; within such cells to RNA, thence to protein and various effects on embryonic development and therefore on adult form and behaviour."
"Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives."
"DNA’s performance as an archival medium is spectacular. In its capacity to preserve a message, it far outdoes tablets of stone."
"The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes."
"Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past."
"DNA molecules themselves, as physical entities, are like dewdrops. Under the right conditions, they come into existence at a great rate, but no one of them has existed for long, and all will be destroyed within a few months."
"The slowest-evolving molecules, like histones, turn out to be the ones that have been most subject to natural selection."
"Evolution by natural selection could not be faster than the mutation rate, for mutation is, ultimately, the only way in which new variation enters the species."
"Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes."
"DNA gets the best of both worlds. The patterns that they bear in their sequences are as durable as the hardest rocks."
"The DNA-copying mechanism does the same kind of error-correction automatically."
"DNA molecules are the centre of a spectacular information technology."
"We are talking about events that happen, but which are exceedingly surprising."
"A miracle is something that happens, but which is exceedingly surprising."
"The only thing miraculous about my hypothetical story is the coincidence between my being struck by lightning and my verbal invocation of the disaster."
"The jostlings of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the whole hand of the statue stays still."
"It is theoretically possible for a cow to jump over the moon with something like the same improbability."
"Our minds can’t cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols."
"Our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middle of the range of times we can imagine."
"Our brains have been built by natural selection to assess probability and risk, just as our eyes have been built to assess electromagnetic wavelength."
"The subjective judgement of an alien with a lifetime of a million centuries will be quite different."
"The total economy of the forest would benefit, and so would every individual tree."
"There are arms races wherever individuals have enemies with their own capacity for evolutionary improvement."
"There is a tendency for brains to become bigger as the millions of years go by."
"The speed of development will be proportional to the development already attained, which will therefore increase with time exponentially, or in geometric progression."
"He did not bother to spell out his assertion that the evolution of sexually attractive plumage might advance with ever-increasing speed, exponentially, explosively."
"In other parts of the battle, success goes to those that are most attractive to the opposite sex."
"Darwin saw that, if a male pheasant or peacock or bird of paradise buys sexual attractiveness, even at the cost of its own life, it may still pass on its sexually attractive qualities through highly successful procreation before its death."
"Female preference is a manifestation of the female nervous system."
"The female nervous system develops under the influence of her genes, and its attributes are therefore likely to have been influenced by selection over past generations."
"Where others had thought of male ornaments evolving under the influence of static female preference, Fisher thought in terms of female preference evolving dynamically in step with male ornament."
"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."
"Every time a male is chosen because of his long tail, not only are genes for long tails being chosen. At the same time, because of the ‘togetherness’ coupling, genes for preferring long tails are also being chosen."
"The idea of genes failing to express themselves is not a difficult one."
"If the main utilitarian disadvantage of a long tail turned out to be the economic cost of growing it in the first place, rather than increased dangers of dying after it has grown, males who are handed an extra-long tail on a plate, as a free gift from Andersson, would not be expected to die particularly young as a result."
"The genetic dictionary has 64 DNA words of three letters each. Every one of these words has a precise translation into protein language."
"The genetic code is universal. I regard this as near-conclusive proof that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor."
"All living things, no matter how different from others in external appearance, are astonishingly uniform when we get down to molecular basics."
"The human mind far prefers discrete names, so in one sense it is just as well that the fossil record is poor."
"What I mainly want a theory of evolution to do is explain complex, well-designed mechanisms like hearts, hands, eyes, and echolocation."
"The most parsimonious tree is the tree which is ‘economically meanest’ with its assumptions, in the sense that it assumes the minimum number of word changes in evolution."
"For any pair of organisms, we can always find sentences that are sufficiently similar to be obviously slightly ‘garbled’ versions of the same ancestral sentence."
"Evolutionary change at the molecular level is mostly neutral, meaning that it is not due to natural selection but is effectively random."
"Complex adaptations are in most cases not properties of species, they are properties of individuals."
"A good taxonomic tree is a family tree of evolutionary relationships."
"The goal of taxonomy is to discover the order in which lineages split from each other in evolutionary time."
"The true cladist makes no bones about the fact that he thinks of the branching trees or ‘cladograms’ as family trees, trees of closeness of evolutionary cousinship."
"Evolutionary theory can explain the phenomena that Darwinism explains, especially adaptive complexity."
"Use and disuse enable animals to become better at the job of surviving in their world."
"Natural selection in the ancestral past has favoured those individuals whose skin happened to respond to wear and tear in an advantageous way."
"The eye has been a useful example before, so why not again?"
"The Darwinian explanation, of course, involves chance too, in the form of mutation."
"Mutation is necessary for evolution, but how could anybody ever have thought it was sufficient?"
"The essence of [Dover's] scheme is that, at each of the 1,000 steps, it didn’t matter which way the species turned."