@@CHAP@@ Introduction to the 2006 Edition
I have been asked to provide a new introduction for this reissue of The Blind Watchmaker. I thought the task would be easy. All I had to do was list the ways—there surely had to be many—in which I should reform the book if I were writing it again today. Eagerly, chapter by chapter, I scanned for errors, misguidednesses, out-of-datenesses, incompletenesses. I genuinely wanted to find them, for science—whatever the frailties of its individual practitioners—is not naturally complacent and pays lip service to the ideal of progress through falsification. But, alas, details aside, I can find no major thesis in these chapters that I would withdraw, nothing to justify the satisfying catharsis of a good recant.
This does not mean, of course, that there is no more to be said. I could easily fill another ten entirely new chapters on the perennially fascinating topic of evolutionary design. But that would be another book. Now that I think of it, it would be called Climbing Mount Improbable (Penguin, 1996). Although each of the two books is self-sufficient and can be read on its own, it is also true that either could be read as a continuation of the other. The particular subject matter of the two books is different, just as all the chapters of the present book are different from each other, but the underlying theme is the same—Darwinism and design.
To say that I do not apologise for this Darwinian continuity would be an understatement. Darwinism is a giant subject, whose many faces are good for more books than could be finished in a full and satisfying career. Nor am I a professional ‘science writer’ who, having ‘done’ evolution, might be expected to turn his attention to physics or astronomy. Why should I? A historian can legitimately write more than one book about history rather than switch to classics or mathematics. A master chef produces yet another book on some new aspect of cooking, correctly reasoning that gardening is best left to master gardeners. Notwithstanding the relative shelf space allocated to the respective topics in bookshops (and understating again), Darwinism is a larger subject than either cookery or gardening. It is my subject and it provides ample scope for one lifetime’s expertise.
Darwinism encompasses all of life—human, animal, plant, bacterial, and, if I am right in the last chapter of this book, extraterrestrial. It provides the only satisfying explanation for why we all exist, why we are the way that we are. It is the bedrock on which rest all the disciplines known as the humanities. I do not mean that history, literary criticism, and the law should be recast in a specifically Darwinian mould. Far from it, very far. But all human works are the products of brains, brains are evolved data-processing devices, and we shall misunderstand their works if we forget this fundamental fact. If more doctors understood Darwinism, humanity would not now be facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance. Darwinian evolution, as one reviewer has observed, ‘is the most portentous natural truth that science has yet discovered’. I’d add, ‘or is likely to discover’.
Other books have appeared in the twenty years since The Blind Watchmaker was published, which I should like to have written and which I would certainly draw upon were I to start the book again. Helena Cronin’s beautifully written The Ant and the Peacock, and Matt Ridley’s equally clear The Red Queen would be bound to influence any rewriting of the chapter on sexual selection. Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea would colour my historical and philosophical interpretations at all points, and his refreshing forthrightness would embolden my critical chapters. Mark Ridley’s magisterial Evolution would be an ever-open source of instruction for me and my readers. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct might have inspired me to tackle the subject of language from an evolutionary point of view, had he not already done it so well. The same applies to ‘Darwinian medicine’ were it not for Randolph Nesse and George Williams’s excellent book on the subject (albeit the title wished by the publishers upon the unfortunate authors is the perversely unhelpful ‘Why we get sick’).