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This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet. I wrote the book because I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place.
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RICHARD DAWKINS
THE BLIND WATCHMAKER
RICHARD DAWKINS
THE BLIND WATCHMAKER
PENGUIN BOOKS
A B O U T THE AUTHOR
Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi in 1941. He was educated at Oxford University, and after graduation remained there to work for his doctorate with the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was an Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1970 he became a Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College. In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Richard Dawkins's first book. The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition, 1989), became an immediate international bestseller and, like The Blind Watchmaker, was translated into all the major languages. Its sequel, The Extended Phenotype, followed in 1982. His other bestsellers include River Out of Eden (1995) and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996; Penguin, 1997). Richard Dawkins won both the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize in 1987 for The Blind Watchmaker. The television film of the book, shown in the Horizon series, won the Sci-Tech Prize for the Best Science Programme of 1987. He has also won the 1989 Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London and