As related in Chapter 9, William Paley’s Natural Theology used the watch analogy to argue that nature must have a designer because it was so complicated, and the parts so admirably suited to their functions. Richard Dawkins (1987, 5), admiring Paley’s ‘beautiful and reverent descriptions of the dissected machinery of life,’ went on to argue that ‘the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics.’ But Dawkins actually carries on the Cartesian (and Paleyan) tradition of viewing animals as complicated machines, based on the ‘misleading engineering metaphor in which independent parts preexist an assembled whole. In biologically evolved systems, however, the integration and complementarity of “parts” come as natural consequences of the progressive differentiation of an antecedent less differentiated whole structure, both phylogenetically and embryologically’ (Deacon 2003, 105).
According to Depew and Weber (1995, 477-8), Dawkins does not offer much of an improvement over Paley.
… Paley’s watchmaker does not completely disappear in Dawkins’s version of evolutionary theory (Dawkins 1986). He is said only to be a ‘blind watchmaker.’ From our perspective, however, there is no watchmaker, blind or sighted, for the simple reason that there is no watch. Natural organization is not an artifact, or anything like it, but instead a manifestation of the action of energy flows in informed systems poised between order and chaos. Directionalities, propensities, and self-organization in a thermodynamic perspective actually exclude the notion that evolution is oriented toward an end in the intentional or design sense. The thermodynamic perspective allows biological adaptedness precisely by excluding design arguments. Directionality of informed, dissipative natural processes excludes directedness.
You could say that organic and mechanical are two ways of looking at systems, rather than two kinds of systems. We can look at some systems either way: we are capable of ‘getting personal’ with machines, or conversely of treating organisms as inanimate objects. But we have two ways of looking at systems because there is a real difference between the two kinds, and most systems fall naturally into one or the other. A mechanical system such as a watch, or a missile guidance system, or the ignition system of a car, are relatively simple to map because they were actually built from maps in the first place – that is, they were deliberately designed and engineered to serve some conscious purpose. You, on the other hand, are much more complex, having self-organized rather than having been artificially assembled from pre-existing parts for predetermined purposes. As Gendlin (APM IV-A.c) puts it, ‘there are no simply separate parts of the body … a part changes and may disintegrate if the processes (subprocesses and larger processes) in which it is involved stop and never resume. Parts of the body are derivative from process-events.’