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Complex stuff, everywhere, it is a special kind of explanation. We would like to know how to get started there, why are they so complicated. ... Is likely explanation is roughly the same, the complexity of things everywhere in the universe at the same time for us, for chimpanzees, worms, oak trees and monsters from outer space. On the other hand, it is not the same thing, I will give the 'simple' things, such as rocks, clouds, rivers, galaxies and quarks. These are things of physics. Chimpanzees, dogs and bats, cockroaches and people as well as worms and bacteria and galaxies dandelions and foreigners goods biology.           The Complexity of Life     We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe. The universe that we know, of course, is a tiny fragment of the actual universe. There may be yet more complicated objects than us on other planets, and some of them may already know about us. But this doesn't alter the point that I want to make. Complicated things, everywhere, deserve a special kind of explanation. We want to know how the came into existence and why they are so complicated. The explanation... is likely to be broadly the same for complicated things everywhere in the universe; the same for us, for chimpanzees, worms, oak trees and monsters from outer space. On the other hand, it will not be the same for what I shall call 'simple' things, such as rocks, clouds, rivers, galaxies and quarks. These are the stuff of physics. Chimps, and dogs and bats and cockroaches and people and worms and dandelions and bacteria and galactic aliens are the stuff of biology.   The difference is one of complexity of design. Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.  Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design. At first sight, man-made artefacts like computers and cars will seem to provide exception. They are complicated and obviously designed for a purpose, yet they are not alive, and they are made of metal and plastic rather than of flesh and blood.   ... The point is that if anything of that degree of complexity were found on a planet, we should have no hesitation in concluding that life existed, or had once existed, on that planet. Machines are the direct products of living objects, they derive their complexity and design from living objects, and they are diagnostic of the existence of life on a planet. The same goes for fossils, skeletons, and dead bodies.   I said that physics is the study of simple things, and this... may seem strange at first. Physics appears to be a complicated subject, because the ideas of physics are difficult for us to understand. Our brains were designed to understand hunting and gathering, mating and child-rearing: a world of medium-sized objects moving in three dimensions at moderate speeds. We are ill-equipped to comprehend the very small and the very large, things whose duration is measured in picoseconds or gigayears; particles that don't have position, forces and fields that we cannot see or touch, which we know of only because they affect things that we can see or touch. We think that physics is complicated because it is hard for us to understand, and because physics books are full of difficult mathematics. But the objects that physicists study are still basically simple objects. They are clouds of gas or tiny particles, or lumps of uniform matter like crystals, with almost endlessly repeated atomic patterns. They do not, at least by biological standards, have intricate working parts. Even large physical objects like stars consist of a rather limited array of parts, more or less haphazardly arranged. The behaviour of physical, nonbiological objects is so simple that it is feasible to use existing mathematical language to describe it, which is why physics books are full of mathematics.   Physics books may be complicated, but physics books, like cars and computers, are the product of biological objects — human brains. The objects and phenomena that a physics book describes are simpler than a single cell in the body of its author. And the author consists of trillions of those cells, many of them different from each other, organised with intricate architecture and precision-engineering into a working machine capable of writing a book.   … Each one of us is a machine, like an airliner only much more complicated. Were we designed on a drawing board too, and were our parts assembled by a skilled engineer?       — Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design                         Indexes/16