The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (Reissued in 2006 and 1996)

The best general account of evolution I have read in recent years. E. O. Wilson. With a new introduction.

Twenty years after its original publication, The Blind Watchmaker, framed with a new introduction by the author, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwins brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte. Natural selectionthe unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process Darwin discoveredhas no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker in nature.