Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. New York:. W.W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning. (p. 21)

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? The answer, Darwin’s answer, is by gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting point. (p. 43)

But there is something very crude and simple about death itself. And nonrandom death is all it takes to select phenotypes, and hence the genes that they contain, in nature. (p. 62)

My thesis will be that events that we commonly call miracles are not supernatural, but are part of a spectrum of more-or-less improbable natural events. A miracle, in other words, if it occurs at all, is a tremendous stroke of luck. Events don’t fall neatly into natural events versus miracles. (p. 139)

In The Selfish Gene I speculated that we may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built ‘survival machines’ for themselves – the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers – brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains – books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer. As they propagate they can change – mutate. And perhaps ‘mutant’ memes can exert the kinds of influence that I am here calling ‘replicator power’. Remember that this means any kind of influence affecting their own likelihood of being propagated. Evolution under the influence of the new replicators – memic evolution – is in its infancy. It is manifested in the phenomena that we call cultural evolution. Cultural evolution is many orders of magnitude faster than DNA-based evolution, which sets one even more to thinking of the idea of ‘takeover’. (pp. 157-158)

First, the idea of ‘coadapted genotypes’. A gene has the particular effect that it does only because there is an existing structure upon which to work. A gene can’t affect the wiring up of a brain unless there is a brain being wired up in the first place. There won’t be a brain being wired up in the first place, unless there is a complete developing embryo. And there won’t be a complete developing embryo unless there isa whole program of chemical and cellular events, under the influence of lots and lots of other genes, and lots and lots of other, non-genetic, causal influences. The particular effects that genes have are not intrinsic properties of those genes. They are properties of embryological processes, existing processes whose details may be changed by genes, acting in particular places and at particular times during embryonic development. (pp. 169-170)

Arms races are run in evolutionary time, rather than on the timescale of individual lifetimes. They consist of the improvements in one lineage’s (say prey animals’) equipment to survive, as a distinct consequence of improvement in another (say predators’) lineage’s evolving equipment. There are arms races wherever individuals have enemies with their own capacity for evolutionary improvement. I regard arms races as of the utmost importance because it is largely arms races that have injected such ‘progressiveness’ as there is in evolution. (p. 178)

After many generations of cumulative selection in a particular place, the local animals and plants become well fitted to the conditions, for instance the weather conditions, in that place. If it is cold the animals come to have thick coats of hair, or feathers. If it is dry they evolve leathery or waxy waterproof skins to conserve what little water there is. The adaptations to local conditions affect every part of the body, its shape and colour, its internal organs, its behaviour, and the chemistry in its cells. (p. 178)