Richard Dawkins-The Blind Watchmaker-Audiobook and Book

The Blind Watchmaker:
Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
by Richard Dawkins, 1986


One of the most famous arguments of the creationist theory of the universe is the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley's: Just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. But as Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, demonstrates in this brilliant and eloquent riposte to the Argument from Design, the analogy is false. Natural selection, the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process that Darwin discovered, has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Patiently and lucidly, Dr. Dawkins - in this book which has been acclaimed as perhaps the most influential work on evolution written in this century - identifies those aspects of the theory which people find hard to believe and removes the barrier to credibility one by one.



This item contains the following content

1] The audiobook as 59 MP3 files
2] The PDF of The Blind Watchmaker
3] The book as the 59 individual Microsoft Word files that correspond to the audiobook files

Note: this book is read by a synthesized voice (AT&T Mike); however, I am a very experienced audio book listener and I have created the MP3 files as well as all of the Microsoft Word source files. I used textspeaker 2.0, converted the Word files to WAV files and then converted them to MP3. After much testing I have determined that this permits a much better quality than simply allowing textspeaker to convert the files directly to MP3. I have created the Microsoft Word files (and therefore the audio files) with some care by placing periods after all titles and sections for natural pauses, as well as the elimination of the title contents pages and any citations that would not normally be found in an audio book, and I have included footnotes that would generally be included within an audiobook. In case you are interested it took approximately half as long, perhaps more, to create this audiobook as it would have taken to simply read the book, but I was hoping to share my work with a larger community as well as to enable myself to listen to the book again at a later date. Often there are many times I listen to audio books and then wish to search for or relisten to a particular item and the inclusion of the PDF as well as the Word file should enable you to search for content electronically which then makes searching for that portion of the audio book considerably more easy.

About Buoy releases:
1] Releases will generally be totally unavailable commercially (such as Recorded Books limited editions for libraries rental customers) They may also be books on cassette which are now not on CD or not on Audible. Phenomenal releases that are out of print on CD, or are more than 5-7 years old may also be posted.

2] I am a very experienced audio book listener and I sometimes create the MP3 files from electronic text via TextSpeaker 2.0, and details follow:

I currently use TextSpeaker 2.0, which converts Word files to WAV files, and then they are converted to MP3 format. After much testing I have determined that this permits a much better quality than simply allowing TextSpeaker to convert the files directly to MP3. I create the Microsoft Word files (and therefore the audio files) with some care by placing periods after all titles and sections for natural pauses, as well as the elimination of the title contents pages and any citations that would not normally be found in an audio book, and I have included footnotes that would generally be included within an audiobook.

3] Interesting content and popular content and mainstream content intersect, but I will rarely if ever post normal or run-of-the-mill mainstream content. Who has time to waste on such doggerel?