[_ Old Earth _] Monkeys & Shakespeare

[John]

The odds against the spontaneous generation of life and evolution itself are obviosly astronomical. Scientists who support the theory of evolution often take the approach that, although the chances against evolution are absolutly staggering, even extremely improbalbe events are bound to happen one time given, billion of years. As george Wla wrote in his book, Physics and Chemistry of life, the arguement is often stated as:

Given so much time the 'impossible' becomes possible, the possible becomes probable and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles.

A common form of this argument is that "if you have a large enough number of monkeys typeing away by chance at computer keyboards, they will eventually produce shakesspeares plays." Surprisinly, the worlds most prominent scientist, Prof Stephen hawkin. wrote in his book a breif history in time : from the big bang to black holes about this myth regarding monkeys and shakespeare. Hawkins wrote, "very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of shakespeares sonnets" Varitations of this arguement in favour of evolution have been used by Thomas huxley and Richard dawkins. The reason this argument has been accepted by so many people is that most of us have difficultly full comprehending extremly large or extremly small numbers.
A mathmatical analsis of this probablitiy problem was completed by Walter J. Remine in his book The biotic mesage: evolution versus message theory. Remine wrote:

The monkeys could not randomly type merely the first 100 characters of hamlet. If we count only lowercase and spaces (27 characters in all), the the probability of typing thee 100 characters is one chance in 27 to the 100th power (one chance in 1.4X10 to the 143 power) If each proton in the observable universe were a typing monnkey (roughly 10 to the 80 power in all) , and they typed 500 characters per minute (faster then the fastest secretary) , around the clock for 20 billion years, then all the monkeys together could make 5X10 to the 96 power at the 100 characters. It would require an additional 3X10 to the 46 power such universes to have an even chance at success, We scientificly conclude that the monkey scenario cannot succeed. For the scientist it would be perverse to insist otherwise.

Many people have casually accepted the claim that enough monkeys would eventually type a shakespeare play by chance gievn enough time. However the truth is that monkeys would never correctly typ even a short sonnet of shakespeare, let alone a complete play, no matter how many billions of years they were allowed to randomly type away at their keyboards. Most scientists consider that if the probablity against the event occuring is greater then one million to one, then for all pratical purposes the odds are zero. As the compelling evidance in this post confirms, the odds against the spontanious generation of life and evolution itself are zero.

 

[John]

Sorry if my spelling is bad, my spell check is not on this computer.

 

[jwu]

Most scientists consider that if the probablity against the event occuring is greater then one million to one, then for all pratical purposes the odds are zero.

Yet people keep winning lotteries, which has a chance of less than 1/1,000,000.

The odds being 1:x means exactly that; it doesn't suddenly jump to zero for no particular reason.

But once again, you're argueing against spontaneous generation, not abiogenesis. And especially not against evolution, as this is a seperate entity.

 

[John]

i know this post did not shed any new light on the subject, but how can you have the blind faith to say evolution did it despite the remarkable odds?

My faith is much more easyer to follow/belive.

 

[Jayls5]

I don't see how the analogy is necessarily applicable to evolution.

It doesn't say how the statistical odds were calculated. Does it start over every time there's a mistake? Does it pull words from Shakespeare's plays and collect them? Does it keep an established correct amount of letters and continue applying letters to that? Does it take into account that monkeys do not hit random keys with equal likelihood? Would this fact have any applicable notion to the likelihood of certain elements being put together?

See, the problem is, we don't know what analogy would correctly apply to abiogenesis. This is because we simply don't know what loaded situations existed that resulted in the first life.