The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins I’d heard many people mention that The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins was a good book, and in some odd chance I actually discovered it sitting on our bookshelf just over a month ago (this sort of thing happens sometimes when your wife is an obsessive book collector as well). After reading some lighter non-fiction to start the year, I decided to dive straight in on something a little more heady.

As it turns out, it took me more than a month to read it, which was quite a bit longer than I figured it would. Part of the reason behind that is spending less time overall reading in the past 30 days, but also due to this book by Dawkins being small on the print and full of ideas that needed a bit more time to digest. An overview and defense of evolution, it’s easily the most in-depth and interesting book that I’d ever read on the subject, and far, far more developed than anything I ever got in school.

All of the above said, the book is fairly easily to digest, it just takes a little more time. The biggest thing that I took away from it was simply the sheer scale of time involved in the development of the earth and evolution. Humans (myself included) are used to thinking of large periods of times as century or even millenium, but those time periods are absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Oddly enough, instead of making me feel like some small, insignificant piece of it all, I came away in awe of the human body and how it developed.

In a rather timely bit of news, I ran across this article (which includes a quote from Dawkins himself) this evening when I got home after work. The Blind Watchmaker has a section devoted to discussing the very idea that the aforementioned article discovery negates, and it seemed like fitting timing given that I’d just read about it. I’m going to tackle a book that’s a little less intensive now, but I might go back to some more Dawkins as some point in the future.