The Blind Watchmaker

Richard Dawkins

This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no

longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.

I wrote the book because I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place! The problem is that of complex design. The computer on which I am writing these words has an information storage capacity of about 64 kilobytes (one byte is used to hold each character of text). The computer was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured. The brain with which you are understanding my words is an array of some ten million kiloneurones.