Llywelyn.net

Those Furiously Typing Monkeys


An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually come up with the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Read that line before, haven't you? If you're a bit older, you remember Bob Newhart and his typing monkeys, who got close to "To be, or not to be" but didn't quite make it. One of the classic justifications for evolution...the narrow-minded flat-earthers among us who don't accept evolution can't get our minds around the bigness of infinity. We are too small, too limited, too restricted. A scientist friend of mine explained this many years ago using the metaphor of tossing bricks over your shoulder. If you could keep the ones that could make up a house, you would eventually have a complete house.

Unfortunately, both the monkey typing and the brick-tosser have two problems. First, time is not infinite (neither is the number of monkeys, for that matter...) No one believes the universe had no beginning. If it had a beginning, it is not infinite, but finite. So the monkeys have produced the Complete Shakespeare in a finite time. And a Complete Bacon and Jonson while they were at it. A small, but significant, difference.

However, the other objection is more important. There's no way to know, in process, which items would be helpful. If a builder (or editor) were watching the bricks, sorted out the good ones, and removed the bad ones....but evolution posits that the bricks (or the words) will provide a reproductive edge themselves. Unfortunately though, many of those words, or bricks, are not clearly necessary until later changes appear. It is not just that so many unlikely things have to happen together, but that so many of those things have no value until combined with other things. The eyeball is magic, but without an optic nerve, it is meaningless. Useless. Can't do anything, even though it is amazingly complex. So all these things have to happen simultaneously, things that in themselves provide no advantage to the survival of the creature, but only do later, when combined with some other unlikely occurrence. Or to use the house building metaphor; if the first floor were complete and the second floor complete, but there was no stairway that appeared in the random tossing, then the second floor is unusable. No evolutionary advantage. Might as well not even be there.

So, the monkey types:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit sadfhaoshdflakdhf;liahdfiloahdfliadf

How do we save "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit" and get rid of the rest, instead of getting "Let me not ajdbfkjrwetrtabhdfjaf marriage of true minds" on the next go-round, and "LKNDSFLKN marriage of true minds" 300 million years later?

Just doesn't make sense without somebody supervising what's happening. Even Newhart recognized that all those years ago; his routine was based upon the guys working there who had to look over the typed material for something of quality.