The Blind Watchmaker

When I look at the world around me, I see things which simply are and things that seem to complex to exist without having a designer. Yet, what I see is not all there is and sometimes I need to open my eyes to understand more than these apparent features of things like complexity and adaptability. Dawkins tells the story of evolution using an approach that answers to my need of order, of things I can and cannot understand. By using the blind watchmaker analogy he makes a clear point in drawing attention to what we see and what we can understand at a certain time and with certain basis. For me, the basis of evolution has been laid some time ago, with the reading of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but the understanding grows deeper every time I read something new.

In this book I’ve understood more clearly the fact that what we see is not what is perfect, but merely what it is functional from an adaptability point. Even with adaptability it must have started with something, and that something isn’t as glamorous as one might think. The grand scale of evolution is the ticking of the clock that got perfected, not the clock itself, and the ways in which this process occurs can be resembled to a blind watchmaker in action. Although we can see the watch, the watch is always changing, even if we don’t perceived as such, or we would never live in a scale of time that would enable us to perceive the changing. The variation of change can be in any direction (to give an advantage or disadvantage) but ultimately the selection favors those variation that tend to make an improvement and therefore they’re more likely to survive and be passed on to the next generation and further submitted to change.

The examples in the book are very useful and especially the way the “biomorphs” evolve can convince almost anyone that there is indeed evolution and when certain restraints from the environment are applied, the forms that take shape can be different and may even resemble some of the creatures that live in our world. The fact that the environment sets the rules and acts as a pressure to everything that is, might be seen as a law in our understanding of how life evolved in our planet. But the fact that life exists and evolves can’t be put to question in my opinion. If somebody sees in nature a perfect watch that needs no adjustments she/he has surely find one of the greatest wonders and perhaps the probability of that happening is so small that it is not even sufficient to be written on the scale of time in which we evolve from the Big Bang on. 

One of the greatest question for me is not how can we have evolved from something but why aren’t we using our intellectual power to evolve in a way in which we can adapt to our environment? Although I state my question I know the answer and just hope that time will prove me wrong.

A great book to read and think about.

River Out of Eden

I’m always interested in how things are created and how they strive to survive. The idea behind this book is to explain how life generates itself and how certain environmental forces pressure all organisms into finding ways to survive. Reading it was like taking into account that all the information that makes us who we are, is sealed in tiny part of our every cell. All humans, animals, plants evolved from this eukaryotic cell which set itself on a path to replicate itself and every successive mutation that has given it an edge over other cells has brought us here. I hope to make myself clear… or at least I try.

I understood the analogy between a river and the river of DNA which all organism posses. I found the examples in the book to be convincing, maybe because I’m well accustomed with Dawkins writings and with the Natural Selection Theory/ Darwinism. I liked it and it gave me once more a clear understanding of our motivations and aspirations in life. Because we are living creatures we must accomplish many tasks to survive and what is important for that survival is mediated, at least, by the environment in which we live, although the forces of the social environment sometimes work in pushing ourselves into wanting more and achieving more than our mere survival. Our own individual survival might seem of great importance to us, and for me certainly is, to think that we are here only in order for the genes to pass on to the next generation might seem cruel, but in light of the evidence presented seems more real that believing a fairytale heaven awaits you at the end of your life journey. (I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I think being aware and respectful towards other people is crucial for our better existence and it gives us a sense of belonging and caring that no other promise might give us- I’m thinking of the promise of heaven if we’re good.)

The more I think that I am here as a creature that can pass information received from parents, the more I find myself involved in my family’s life, my community and the world. This idea has given me the huge responsibility of being aware of myself and the messages that I transmit in a conscious way. Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit, after all, the genes might be passed on, and only if I can fundamentally make a difference maybe I can pass a meme. It seems so grandiose but in the end it’s just my brain trying to put a meaning to all the information that reaches me.