Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker

July 18, 2011

Here is a fantastic video elegantly removing the legs from the archaic, yet amazingly still used, watchmaker” analogy. Even if you’re well past believing in fairy tales, it’s worth a watch (pun not intended, but embraced) for its excellent job of explaining evolution via mutation and natural selection.

One thing I should add is: expect to pause frequently. I kept pausing the whole way through the video to read the captions, silently cursing the video’s creator (remarkably intelligent designer) only to discover he clearly warns about this in the video’s description.

4 Responses

  1. I agree that it’s very cool, but I think (unfortunately) that this video is never going to change anybody’s mind.  It’s way too technical and wordy.  People who don’t believe in evolution are not going to have the patients to try to understand what was done.  For myself, I wish he had given at least one animation showing one of the evolved clocks actually working.
    It takes more than a Coldplay soundtrack to give something like this the emotional impact it needs.  Ryan, you should re-edit it!

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  4. You’re absolutely right Chris. I think it’s pretty difficult to hold on to a non-evolution standpoint in the light of intellect, and thus those that do must not be.

    For me, an armchair programmer (if such a term exists), the brilliance of the video is the genesis of the idea to use pieces of a watch and the algorithm that was used to illustrate generational evolution. It’s just clever, in an admittedly very geeky sort of way. I would have to re-watch the video as I can’t remember for certain, but one thing it doesn’t handle is mutation — it’s purely natural selection, right? So that would be another slight negative. But overall, for some dude to just go from “hey, I think I’ll make this to show ….” to having the program and the video, that’s a “thing well done” to me.

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