Science HP*1 1 1 I I 1 I takkkîl 1he Bible
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by Bo lton Davidheiser, P h .D .
MONKEY IN THE PRINT SHOP
cessity of employing a monkey, the selective agent who was the real au thor of the book, was greatly handi capped and was slowed down in pro ducing his book. The author points out the great difference in requiring e v o lu tion through selective action on chance variations to produce a specific species of fly, on the one hand, or to produce just any insect. He compares these alternatives to drawing a cer tain specified sequence of playing cards from a shuffled pack, on the one hand, and the drawing of just any sequence. When cards are shuffled, they must of necessity by the very nature of things be in some order. Thus the analogy does not hold, because it is not necessary that any kind of insect or anything else come about through a natural selection of chance varia tions. The analogy would be closer to that intended if we considered the chance that repeated globs of paper pulp and colored pigments, through some sort of fortuitous treatment followed by selection, would ever produce something resembling a card of any sort, whether it be a type of “playing card” or a card from the game of Old Maid. Darwin’s theory of natural selec tion, or survival of the fittest, pro vides an explanation of the means whereby kinds of animals and plants may become better adapted to their environment. An example of this is the increase in numbers of dark moths in areas of industrialization, where the trees have become dark ened. The dark moths blend with the new environment as they rest on the trees in the daytime. They have in creased in number because the birds which eat moths do not see the dark ones as readily as they see the light ones on the dark background. This is a very different thing from Dar win’s supposition that all the multi tude of forms of life on earth came about through natural selection from one or a few simple types in the beginning.
T h e o ld a r g u m e n t that if a million monkeys struck the keys of a mil lion typewriters for a million years they might produce a Shakespearean play was intended to show by analo gy that, given enough time, evolu tion could produce almost anything. This illustration was supposed to favor the theory of evolution. A lit tle computation, however, reveals that the chances are exceedingly small indeed that a million monkeys typing furiously for a million years would produce even the first line of a Shakespearean play. An article in a recent issue of a trade magazine that reaches a large percentage of high school and col lege biology teachers says that peo ple who are bothered by this kind of argument (because it now opposes the theory of evolution) do not real ize that its weakness lies in the fact that it fails to take into account the selective action of Darwin’s natural selection principle. (Julian Huxley, for example, has said that without the help of natural selection the chance of horses evolving would be about one chance in a number so large that to print it would require three volumes of 500 pages each.) The author of the article believes the analogy would be better if we think of a monkey spilling type in a print shop, while an intelligent agent picks out individual words composed of chance assemblages of repeatedly spilled type. He says that in this way the monkey could in fact make a book. But a little reflection shows that a book produced in this manner would be nothing more than a “ spelling book,” and not even a practical one at that, for it would not be graded. To produce a book that made some sense, the selective agent would have to have a theme in mind and wait for the monkey to jproduce the needed words, rejecting all the other words which the mon key produced by chance. Would there then be any ground for saying that the monkey had made the book? A more accurate way of say ing it would be that through the ne
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