In his choice of the title for this book, Dawkins refers to the watchmaker analogy made famous by William Paley in his 1802 book "Natural Theology". Paley, writing long before Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, held that the complexity of living organisms was evidence of the existence of a divine creator by drawing a parallel with the way in which the existence of a watch compels belief in an intelligent watchmaker. Dawkins, in contrasting the differences between human design and its potential for planning with the workings of natural selection, therefore dubbed evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker.