Where Did That Watch Come From?

This has annoyed me for ages.
If there is a watch, there must be a watchmaker. Yeah, okay. Therefore, if there is life on planet Earth ...
No, no. Let me stop you there. You skipped something.
Where did the watchmaker learn to make the watch? Where did she get the parts? Did she imagine it all by herself? How did she know time should be divided up the way the watch divides it?
Do people really think that inventions spring fully-formed from the forehead of some really smart person (or a god)? Everything we have, that we make, is based on technology that has come before. Everything we make has evolved. And it took a long, long time to get from one idea (Time - Hey, when's the best time to plant some crops?) to another (Ooooo, digital watch!), but often the latter stages start coming fast and furious. Sometimes technology gets stuck in a rut for a while until someone figures out some nuance to get it going again. [Cold fusion? Helloooo.]
But the fact remains that a watch developed out of hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of cutting time into pieces. And one of the prerequisites was the need for cutting time into pieces.
Let there be light! There was Dawn with her rosy fingers, noon when the sun was at its apex, and tobacco-stained Dusk. As the seasons changed, daytime and nighttime would duke it out and become longer for one and shorter for the other and then go back. The hours of the day were not uniform throughout the year. What good was a timepiece that divided the day into regular intervals? Who would care? Where was the need? (Apparently, there was a need to limit politicians from talking too long, but a water clock worked for that.)
What sort of technology goes into a watch? Let's imagine one of those cool. old-fashioned fob watches. Very basic. You wind it up, and it ticks. First of all, it's made of metal. You need to be able to extract metal from ore and shape it. Oh, wait. You need fire first. You need to control that fire. It probably needs to get pretty darn hot to melt metal. Well, we're at the Bronze Age now. No problem. Some folks worked that out for us.
What about that winding? Someone has to invent a spring. Alternatively, someone has to discover the properties of the pendulum. What about gears? Where did that idea even come from? Someone has to find a way to make all this much smaller, more accurate, and also attractive.
Thousands contributed to the making of a watch.
In 1972 I bought a watch in Switzerland, because that's what you did. And now I don't even wear one. I have a phone that is my watch, my camera, and a total time-sucker.  The watch has evolved right before my very eyes.
So, just because I didn't see life on this planet evolve and can't explain exactly how it happened, doesn't mean life didn't evolve. It took an amount of time and slow change that I would have difficulty fathoming because it is just so vast. At the same time (haha), the technology of a simple watch is something I could not replicate. I couldn't even begin to know how to smelt ore. I leave that up to the experts. And I leave all the steps up to the experts as it seems the human race has a hive mind with everyone running around being expert in their own thing and contributing to society as a whole. Sort of the way every part of our body performs a different job and shares the results to make us live.
I can see the parallels. Or do I mean paradigm? Let me check my phone. Siri might know.

They're Going At It the Wrong Way

I've been doing some reading recently about Evolution versus Intelligent Design.  I've read lots of articles and books about developments in the Theory of Evolution over the years and they are thought-provoking and interesting, but I've yet to see any articles about actual developments in a Theory of Intelligent Design.  There doesn't seem to be more of a theory to it than "this looks like it was designed."  Apparently, there was a think-tank created to develop this as a theory, but they haven't come up with anything - no scientific papers, no insights or discoveries.  In fact, the only success they've had is in the public relations angle. 

Granted, PR is much easier to accept than scientific explanations because it's catchy and doesn't require a whole lot of thought.  If there's anything humans don't want to do, it's think too hard.  Thinking is work.  Reading about Evolution is work.  It leaves some unanswered questions that might require more work to figure out.  The beauty of Intelligent Design is that you don't have to do that work, so I can see why this is so popular. 

Proponents of ID want to have it taught alongside Evolution (which shouldn't take long: "See this? Someone designed it - just for you! Pretty, isn't it?") as a preface to eradicating Evolution altogether.  Something they don't take into account is that kids only learn this stuff long enough to pass a test and then most of them lose all interest in it.  The only ones who will remember are the ones whose interest is piqued and want to pursue the subject.  What do you remember from high school?  The difference between ser and estar?   Logarithms?  The names of the nucleotide bases in DNA? (I didn't even remember their initials - I had to look it up on Wikipedia.)  What are these ID people worried about?

This is my Modest Proposal: It would save money and effort to have school boards propose guidelines to make science in general as boring as possible.  That way textbooks will not have to be rewritten or replaced, teachers would not have to keep up with the latest developments in actual science and could recycle the same lesson plans for decades, and parents would understand their kids' homework for a change.  Only nerds will have any interest in science regardless of how lame the instruction is and they tend to be self-directed about learning anyway.  No one has ever had anything to do with nerds, so the contagion of Interest in Science will not spread and will be confined to types like computer programmers - who actually have to design minutiae intelligently.