Contributor: Kyle Smeby

Written in 1986 The Blind Watchmaker remains one of the best explanations of Darwin's evolution and rebuttals to its nay-sayers. The genome may have been mapped since then, but that additional data hasn't helped anyone make the complexities of evolution any more accessible than this book did. While Dawkins can be a little smug in his atheism he manages to make his explanations humorous and his digressions (which can go on at great length) hilarious. His humor certainly makes what could be an otherwise very dull topic fascinating.

Most interesting of all are the examples he takes from nature, fish that "see" using electricity, three species of cicadae that emerge only every 13 years and their sibling race that follow a 17 year cycle, squid eye mechanics, bat and dolphin sonar, etc., etc. Dawkins also uses analogies to human phenomenon to explain the evolution of many of nature's solutions to the survival problem, as in the aforementioned sonar. Evidence would seem to show that dolphins had to overcome many of the same challenges our U.S. Navy did in developing sonar and that gazelles and cheetahs are in an arms race similar to the United States and the Soviet Union (the book was written in 1986 mind you).

Also interesting is that Dawkins effectively answers many of the claims evolutions critics make to disprove the theory--to this day! The most well known of these now goes by the name of "irreducible complexity" but still boils down to creationists view that the human eye is too complex to have evolved by natural selection. Dawkins answers that critique here as many have done since, but I have a feeling we'll keep hearing it anyway.

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