The title of the book is a reference to the eighteenth century theologician William Paley, who used an analogy to compare the complexity of a watch to the complexity of a living organism. A watch is too complicated to have sprung into existence on its own—it must have had an intelligent designer—and thus a human, with even more complexity, must also have an intelligent designer. In the book, however, Dawkins shows that if evolution is analogized to a “watchmaker,” then it is a blind watchmaker because evolution does not seek a predetermined goal as a watchmaker, or an engineer, would.

The book could be condensed. A lot. It was an arduous read at times, especially towards the beginning, because Dawkins has the peculiar ability to write pages and pages without actually saying anything. He likes to lead the reader around—often jaunting towards dead ends or running circles around the main point for a while before reaching it. It's really hard to read this book critically and works better if you just shut your brain down and play along. Oh yeah, that sounds reasonable. No wait, he's right, that doesn't make sense. Well now, this point sounds intriguing. Oh, no, he did it again: that's not a valid argument. It's almost as if he used a stream-of-consciousness brainstorming process to find which ideas to put in the book, and then used all of them. He missed the crucial brainstorming step of paring down your list to a manageable number of quality ideas to actually use. So when his thinking led to erroneous conclusions or circular arguments he still included them in the book if only to point out their falseness or invalidity. I found this irritating.

Anyway, for purposes of analysis, I outlined below some situations in which stream-of-consciousness writing is permissible and some situations in which it is not permissible.

Unfortunately for Dawkins, his book falls into the negative category.

My other complaint is probably just me being curmudgeonly because this quality pervades most of the science writing that I have read. “Hey! Hey look at me! Look at how smart I am! Yeah, over here! I wrote this book because I'm so intelligent!” It probably comes with the turf but I still find it annoying. If you can get past the boring, long-winded, and pretentious parts, however, it's a thoughtful and convincing explanation of how evolution is not only plausible but is the most probable current explanation for the existence of life on earth.

Aside: notice that not once did I use the word “lucid” in this book review. I've had enough of hearing all science writing described as being lucid. Is that the only word these reviewers know? Sometimes in bookstores I play a little game: go to the popular science section and see how many books you can find that do not feature a testimonial touting the lucidity of the book. You win if you can find one.