Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 573
THE ‘BLIND WATCHMAKER' WHO IS ALSO DEAF AND DUMB genes it carried. The genes themselves, Dawkins should not forget, are mindless unconscious things. Forget the fish for a while, let him explain how he himself could have devised and constructed such a fish with all the modern scientific know-how at his service!. Visualizing how this highly sophisticated electrical device was constructed in the sea, without purpose, without design and without a knowledge of how electricity works, one is only left with the scenario that one day in the remote past, an ordinary fish might have been surprised with the bizarre chance appearance of some portholes in its belly. . All we can do is to sympathize at its exasperation while waiting for this most complicated electronic generative system to evolve into a meaningful device. Some internal disturbance indeed for the fish because as yet it could not have understood any useful purpose for this rigmarole. . How long it could have taken in terms of Darwinian time,. Dawkins understands better. Then, somewhere else in the body, the voltmeter began to appear with connecting wires to the tiny brain of the fish, and some fantastic physical changes were followed by a new arrangement of each muscle with special alignment and phenomenal qualities. . The unknown maker, whoever it was, had thus created a masterpiece of an electric generator. Was it the knownothing formless mindless principle of natural selection?. Was it the brain of the fish which was not even aware of its own functional abilities? Was it the almighty gene which without possessing a conscious brain occupied the command centre to perfectly operate a system which had to be operated by a highly competent scientist?. Dawkins also avoids many other key issues. He provides no clear logical solution for the question as to why two such electric fish species, the South American and. African weakly electric fish, are quite unrelated to each 537