The Blind Watchmaker

The first point that might occur to us, as a necessary attribute of a complex thing, is that it has a heterogeneous structure.

as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.

The minimum requirement for us to recognize an object as an animal or plant is that it should succeed in making a living of some sort (more precisely that it, or at least some members of its kind, should live long enough to reproduce). It

problem that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to be made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the night-

complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance, that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random chance alone. In

Helena Cronin’s beautifully

written The Ant and the Peacock,

Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea would colour my historical

Darwinism, unlike ‘Einsteinism’, seems to be regarded