The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

This groundbreaking book, The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins ignited a paradigm shift in the discourse surrounding evolution and biology in art. According to Grant Taylor in When the Machine Made Art, this book’s importance cannot be overstated: “One of the most important shifts for computer art was the work of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.” Taylor explains that this is because of Dawkins’s use of simulated artificial organisms called “biomorphs” that Dawkins created “seeking to illustrate how complexity could be generated by simple rules.”