The Blind Watchmaker

Dawkins named his tour-de-force account of neo-Darwinism The Selfish Gene because he wanted to stress that evolution does not especially promote the ‘welfare’ of species or individual organisms. But, as he also explained, it does not promote the ‘welfare’ of genes either: it adapts them not for survival in larger numbers, nor indeed for survival at

Komplexitätsforscher wie die Amerikaner David Depew und Bruce Weber nehmen an, dass die darwinistische Selektion nur einen Spezialfall eines viel umfassenderen Szenarios der Selbstorganisation darstellt. »Selbstorganisierende Systeme können überhaupt nur in begrenztem Maß durch Selektion beeinflusst werden«,

Darwinian evolution uniquely solves the problem of life’s statistical improbability, because it works cumulatively and gradually. It really does broker a legitimate traverse from primordial simplicity to eventual complexity – and it is the only known theory capable of doing so. Human engineers can make complex things by design, but the whole point

The biosphere is utterly saturated with design, with purpose, with reasons. What I call the “design stance” predicts and explains features throughout the living world using the same assumptions that work so well when reverse-engineering artifacts made by (somewhat) intelligent human designers.