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πŸ“š The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

πŸ“š The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Wed 14 Oct Β· 19:00

Purecraft Bar & Kitchen

12Β°C Β· 24% rain

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About This Event

A reading group discusses Richard Dawkins' book 'The Blind Watchmaker' at the Purecraft Bar & Kitchen in Birmingham on 14 October 2026. The session involves selective reading and analysis of the text.

**πŸ“š The Blind Watchmaker** by **Richard Dawkins** **Format** Selective Reading (required chapter 1,2,3 about 100 pages, optional chapter 5,7 about 80pages) **About** **If life looks designed, does that mean someone designed it?** The natural world seems full of purpose: eyes that see, wings that fly, organisms that reproduce, and astonishingly complex systems that appear almost perfectly suited to their environments. For centuries, this apparent design was taken as evidence of a designer. Richard Dawkins challenges that intuition by asking a radically different question: **Can we get the appearance of design without a designer?** In *The Blind Watchmaker*, Dawkins explores how evolution by natural selection can gradually produce extraordinary complexity from simple beginningsβ€”with no foresight, plan, or conscious direction. But this isn’t only a book about evolution. It raises deeper questions about **purpose, chance, necessity, complexity, and our tendency to see intention behind the world around us.** Could something with no mind, no plan and no idea what it is producing nevertheless create things that look as though they were engineered by an intelligent designer? **Reading required:** **Chapter 1 β€” Explaining the Very Improbable** Why living things are fundamentally different from things that merely happen to be complicatedβ€”and how something can appear designed even though no designer planned it. **Chapter 2 β€” Good Design** What an evolutionary β€œengineer” can produce without understanding engineering itself, from the astonishing sonar of bats to the mysterious question of what it is actually like to experience the world as another creature. **Chapter 3 β€” Accumulating Small Change** Why a single leap from randomness cannot explain complex adaptations, but generation after generation of small random variations filtered by non-random selection can transform the almost impossible into the ordinary. **Optional:** **Chapter 5 β€” The Power and the Archives** How DNA act

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Frequently asked questions

πŸ“š The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins takes place on Wednesday, 14 October 2026 at 19:00.

πŸ“š The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is held at Purecraft Bar & Kitchen in Birmingham (30 Waterloo St, B2 5TJ, Birmingham).

The forecast for πŸ“š The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is Light drizzle Β· 12Β°C.

Yes β€” hotels within walking distance of Purecraft Bar & Kitchen can be compared using the accommodation search further down this page.

Tickets for πŸ“š The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins can be booked via meetup.com using the "Check Tickets & Live Prices" button on this page, which opens the official booking site in a new tab.