BreakPoint Blog
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Even a Monkey Can Do It? Topics: Health & Science, Technology In an experiment, computer programmer Jesse Anderson is trying to see if it is possible to recreate a complete work of William Shakespeare using virtual monkeys. Even monkeys can be successful some of the time, so to speak. According to reports for the BBC News, "After the equivalent of billions and billions and billions of monkey years the simulated apes had only produced part of a line from Henry IV, Part 2." |
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Even if one were able to "randomly" generate all of the molecules of a human (or protozoan) body in exactly the right proportions (which is countless orders of magnitude more difficult than the project presented), putting them all together in a glob won't make them alive. The only thing this proves is the gullibility of the media.
thissentenceisverydifficulttoreadwithoutspacesorpunctuationisntit
not this:
"This sentence is very difficult to read without spaces or punctuation, isn't it?"
And of course, capital letters means you're dealing with not 26 characters, but 52. The problem is way harder than the experiment makes it appear to be.
And while the result of this experiment may be seen as a support for evolution, it's worth noting that first, this is random mutations only nine characters at a time, out of how ever many total letters in the works of Shakespeare. A more representative experiment would be to take that same enormous number of characters, perhaps all the writing of Isaac Asimov or R.C. Sproul or some other prodigious author, and transform them into Shakespeare's works by randomly changing letters while insisting that all changes result in words found in the dictionary.
Second, note that the problem has a definite goal, whereas evolution, we're told, does not. Plus, a great deal of intelligence has been used to guide progress toward solving the problem.
But my favorite part is the last few words of the last paragraph. One might call it "throwing a monkey wrench into the works".