The new hottest Evolution Bestsellor

You were expecting this guy, maybe? Steven J. Goop? Something happened. Something bad. Click on the graphic. Guess who did that?

If you’re interested in more information about Steven J. Goop, go here. 

The Man of the Hour

The Ol’ Watchmaker Gets a Customer in a Race Against Time.

Then some haggling of course…

DAWKINGS BOOK TOUR REMARKS There is part of one wealthy, successful species that agrees with me – because they know…. They know they didn’t – look, if life on earth, if the human race has been successful, it didn’t get there on its own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. I think we can all recognise that. (Applause.)

But if you were successful, some large assemblage of chemicals along the line made it happen. There was a great, incredibly slow and long lasting — and quite unintelligent — series of chemical reactions that built everything about you way, way before you were born. Think of it as a series of genetic and behavioral accidents that created you and everything else around you, including this inertially driven American system we have that allowed you to thrive. Some DNA-defined intelligence out of your reach built roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Some chain of mathematically deterministic events made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own, but it may as well have. It was baked in the cake do to speak, not actually planned by anyone but rather a natural path of least resistance pursued through something that looked like research into all the ways companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed as people, we succeed not primarily because of our individual initiative, but because we have most of the genetically determined tools and drives that resemble initiative to ordinary people. Most things, like fighting fires or running governments, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be an impossible way of organizing fighting fires. Yet large organizations do exist to fight fires and do it quite effectively. They didn’t build themselves either. Some Thing, long long ago set it all in motion.

I like to use the comparison of the blind watchmaker, who slowly puts things together, one cog and one gear at a time, not actually knowing what cigs and gears even do, but the watch gets built all the same. Why? Because what this particular watchmaker has is time. Incredibly, unbelievably large amounts of time.

You can see it works, right? Now, all we have to do to make the comparison work is subtract the watchmaker. Who doesn’t exist.

You’ll note that I didn’t use a personal pronoun in referring to him. No “he” or “she.” If I had, some of you gullible ones might have supposed I was talking about God. I wasn’t. He doesn’t exist. So the watch built itself, you ask? Yes. It did. Or it wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be here. And the watch is here, and we are here, and the fire department is here. So what do we need with a silly piece of mythology like God to explain what built all this? We don’t. What matters is today, and who is building it all today. Which is why we have governments to run the things you can’t understand and geniuses like me to explain to governments the things they have to understand to keep building your lives for you. You can thank me later.

I will thank you all now and return to my modest life at Oxford and the BBC.

Thank you and good night. (Applause.)