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July 18, 2005

A Million, Million, Million Monkeys

Remember the evolutionists claim that given enough monkeys banging on enough typewriters sooner or later one of them would type out the complete works of Shakespeare? Via Dean Esmay comes the word that someone's putting that to the test.

So far a simply extraordinary number of virtual monkeys (5.67088e+47 as I write this--the population continuously expands) have typed 1 letter per second each for 5.01633e+48 virtual years, and haven't managed to get much past a couple of dozen letters of any given play.

Click here to join the effort (and become a monkey). (Isn't that de-evolution?) Fun little experiment, but seriously folks, which has a higher probability; typing out the text of all of Shakespeare's plays by chance, or lining up the atoms, molecules, proteins and such of a single cell and get the right amount of jolt to begin life by chance?

Mathematical note: A billion years expressed in the scientific notation you see above is 1.0e+09 (1 times 10 to the ninth--a "1" with 9 zeroes after it). The number of virtual years noted above is over 1 times 10 to the 48th, i.e. a "1" with 48 zeroes after it. Yes, the comparison between random chemicals mixing and monkeys typing may be a comparison of apples and...bananas, but it does help show how astonishingly remote such a chance is.

Posted by Doug at July 18, 2005 02:31 PM

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Explanations for the origins of life do not involve random collisions of molecules leading to a fully-formed cell. It is thought that precursors to life formed as molecules capable of at least partly catalyzing their own synthesis. For example, there has been a lot of research performed on the properties of RNA, which is something like DNA, but is thought to be smaller and closer in chemical composition to that of the earth's early surface and atmosphere. Some of this research (including Nobel prize-winning work) has shown that simple RNA molecules are capable of processes that would be involved in self-replication. It is a small step from this so-called "autocatalytic RNA" to DNA, which is genetic material found in all living organisms.

Let's consider your mathematical analogy next. First, your monkey story is never used as more than an analogy - i.e. a metaphorical teaching tool - in science. It is not representative of real probabilities, and arguing it is
hard to imagine does not mean it can't happen. Consider the following. Synapses of nerve cells are thought to be where information is stored in the brain. Your brain is thought to contain 1e13 synapses. What do you think the probability of two bits of information coming together (i.e. an association of two things) at one synapse is? It's really small, but that situation arises quite frequently.

Here is another example: If you take two aspirin, the number of molecules of drug in your body is 1 million times less than the number of water molecules in your body. Those relatively few drug molecules must find
their way from your stomach (and not all of them are absorbed) to your blood, then to the cells causing your pain , where enough drug must get inside those cells (most molecules do not) to interact with the molecules that are causing your pain. That seems pretty unlikely, but it happens.

Speaking of drugs, if you really don't believe in evolution then I suggest you reconsider why you trust western medicine. After all, medications are generated by drug companies in screens involving animals. Anything that
works in a particular assay is then tested on humans. The reason why animals are used first is because their bodies work like ours do. In fact, the closer the evolutionary relationship, the better model an animal is for drug studies. This is why rats are used instead of chicks and why monkeys, whose gene sequences are greater than 99% identical to those of humans, are the best test subjects of all.

One could draw two possible conclusions from your inability to imagine life forming spontaneously (which is a little different from evolution, by the way). One could conclude that spontaneous generation does not occur, or one could conclude that you don't understand biology enough to have formed an accurate mental concept of the idea you don't believe in. As an example, consider microorganisms. Before microscopes were invented, probably nobody imagined that bacteria and molds existed.

If you have specific arguments against the science of evolution, it would be very educational to hear them. Until that time, maybe you should read a little more. Science education in this country is bad enough without undermining it further with misleading arguments.

Posted by: dem at July 20, 2005 12:15 AM