The Blind Watchmaker¶
Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. W. W. Norton.
Cited by¶
1 citation across 1 artifact.
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Primes¶
- Gall's Law
- The viability check on intermediates asks, for any proposed path, whether each waypoint is itself a working system or only a partial sub-component of the target; any non-viable waypoint puts the path at risk. Genotype-phenotype connectivity asks whether the viable subset of the design space is connected along the proposed single-step modifications; if not, no incremental path exists. Functional-shift recognition notes that viable intermediates often perform a different function from the target's — an eye-spot that becomes a directional eye that becomes a focusing eye serves vision at every stage, but different versions of it — so the designer must look for the function the intermediate performs, not only the target's.
This sourceArgues that complex organs such as the eye arise through a chain of functional intermediates (light-sensitive patch → cup → pinhole → lensed eye), each useful at its stage — the biological viable-intermediates case.
- The viability check on intermediates asks, for any proposed path, whether each waypoint is itself a working system or only a partial sub-component of the target; any non-viable waypoint puts the path at risk. Genotype-phenotype connectivity asks whether the viable subset of the design space is connected along the proposed single-step modifications; if not, no incremental path exists. Functional-shift recognition notes that viable intermediates often perform a different function from the target's — an eye-spot that becomes a directional eye that becomes a focusing eye serves vision at every stage, but different versions of it — so the designer must look for the function the intermediate performs, not only the target's.
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