The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins (1986)

Sometimes there is just to much desperate silliness in our world

The Theory of Evolution is in my opinion easy to understand, but made deliberately

complicated by some religious groups. That's nothing else as an attempt to turn the wheel of time backwards and to destroy the knowledge of humankind, to gain easier excess to new sheeps and blind followers... It's easy to tell someone what he has to think and do if I can just quote from my special books of books, even if it doesn't make any rational sense.

Richard Dawkins, and other scientists, is for a long time in a fight with those fisherman of stupidity. In the foreword of this German edition of his book doesn't say this, but it tells the reader, that this book went into reprint, because it was asked about it so much.

It is just my interpretation that those people asked for it because it goes against the argument from design, and refutes it in a rational way.

Nothing new to me but quite important never the less.

There wouldn't be any debate if every student would get a basic and neutral understanding about this theory. It is easy to understand and explains a lot about the biology of this world.

But unfortunately a lot of religious schools have adopted an affinity to fundamentalism and can't get there heads around the thought, that science isn't interested in there special brand of religion or mythology. They do their very best to fill this world with stupidity and ignorance as if it was something blissful to march blindly through this world.

I think, if you pretend to be blind to this world on this kind of level, that you would neither see the watch in the forest nor the tree.

Manchmal ist einfach zu viel verzweifelte Dummheit in unserer Welt:

Die Evolutionstheorie wird meines Erachtens nach durch die verzweifelten Versuche mancher religiöser Strömungen unnötig verkompliziert. Das ist nicht weiter als ein Versuch das Rad der Zeit und die Bildung der Menschheit zu zerstören um einfacher nach neuen Schäfchen und blinden Gefolgsleuten zu fischen... wer die Antwort nicht weiß, dem kann ich leicht vorsagen was mir mein Buch der Bücher darüber erzählt, auch wenn das alles keinerlei rationalen Sinn ergibt.

Richards Dawkins führt seit langem, wie viele Wissenschaftler, einen Streit mit diesen Menschenfischern der Dummheit. Im Vorwort zu dieser deutschen Ausgabe seinen Werks wird darauf nicht wirklich eingegangen, aber sie erwähnen, dass sie dieses Buch wieder veröffentlichen, weil die Nachfrage nach diesem Werk sehr groß war.

Ich kann nur vermuten, dass es für viele so wichtig ist, weil es eines der immer wieder kehrenden Argumente der religiösen Fronten in diesem Streit, dem Argument des Design, sachlich widerlegt.

Nichts neues für mich aber sicherlich weiterhin wichtig.

Wo im Grunde keine Debatte geführt werden müsste, wenn allen Schülern einfach eine grundlegendes und neutrales Verständnis der Evolutionstheorie zugestanden werden würde. Es ist ein leicht zu begreifendes System, in dem unsere biologische Welt funktioniert.

Leider aber haben viele religiöse Strömungen unserer Zeit aber einen Hang zum Fundamentalismus und können sich nicht damit abfinden, dass sich Wissenschaft nicht für Religion und Mythologie interessiert, und arbeiten fleißig daran mit Dummheit und Ignoranz zu werben, als wäre irgendetwas Gutes daran, blind durch die Welt zu marschieren.

Ich denke ja, wenn man absichtlich derartig blind ist, dass man weder die Uhr noch den Baum im Wald erkennen würde.

I have to take a break with this one. What an annoying writing style, I'm sure I read nothing more repetitive as this, ever. And what's up with all those thous and thees? Coming my self from a country which uses a formally form to address people, I would never translate it with something from a Shakespeare play ;)

Maybe my younger self was completely justified for hating Hemingway after reading "The Old Man and the Sea" at sixteen.

Don't trust professional reviews

Don't trust Book Blurbs

Don't trust the first page

and don't trust an author to represent evolution correctly, if it isn't written by a biologist.

Some books are just out there to make me angry.

Still nice cover ;)

I think a real misanthrope should not care what other people think about him... still in search of the meaning of this book. Rambling biology lessons can't be all, can they?

Inge Lohmark, is a biology teacher in Western Pommerania, one of the parts of Germany, where no one lives anymore, since the Fall of the Wall. She is as a teacher, in a school that will be closed because of the lack of students, with a lot of traits totally cool for people who admire Fräulein Rottenmeyer from 'Heidi'.

She is old fashioned in her teaching styles, can't stand kids in adolescence and is passionate only about her subject.

... and everything she says about her fellow teachers and her students so far is hilarious and true. I'm not a teacher but I was a student once, and now I'm right back there, but it might have been my math teacher who was like her.