One of the arguments advanced for evolution is that time and chance, enough of them, would eventually produce the world as we know it. This is often illustrated by saying if you gave enough monkeys enough time (and typewriters) they’d eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. And apparently, many people find that persuasive. I don’t. I find Genesis 1 and Romans 1 provide all the explanation I need. I don’t imagine that a skeptic would be persuaded by the following, but one day I sat down to crunch the numbers on monkeys and Shakespeare.
Take a simple quote from Shakespeare, “To be or not to be,” (Hamlet Act 3, scene 1). This profound question is posed in six basic words. Five of them two-letters, one of them three. Two words are repeated. By considering this very simple quotation we’ll keep things manageable. But even so, the numbers quickly become mind-boggling.
I don’t know how fast monkeys type but let’s assume one keystroke per second. That’s 3,600 keystrokes an hour; 86,400 keystrokes a day (24 hours, not 8, we want to get this done quickly); 31,536,000 keystrokes per year. At 31.5 million keystrokes a year, how long would it take a monkey to randomly type “To be or not to be”? One year? Five? Twenty? A hundred? Maybe you’re familiar with probability and think in terms of thousands or millions of years. Even then you wouldn’t be close. It would take one monkey 3.5 quintillion (a one followed by eighteen zeros) years to randomly type “To be or not to be”. To bring it into a realm of numbers we’re vaguely familiar with, it would take a billion monkeys 3.5 billion years to crank it out.
With such numbers the eyes glaze over and the mind begins to wander – it sounds like a government program – but the math is pretty simple, and instructive. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, add a space bar and a shift key for a total of 28 keys. The odds of hitting any single key on a stroke are 1 in 28. The odds of hitting two particular keys in succession are 1 in 28 times 1 in 28 or 1 in 28 squared. The odds of hitting three particular keys in succession, e.g. “T”* then “o” then “space” are 1 in 28 cubed (i.e. 1 in 21,952). The phrase “To be or not to be” is 18 characters (counting ‘space’ as a character). The odds of randomly typing these 18 characters in succession on a 28 character keyboard are 1 in 28 to the 18th power or 1 in 111 followed by 24 zeros. Not bloody likely! as the Bard might say.
The numbers are so big, the likelihood so small, it’s difficult to envision. Try this on for size – though I have no idea how old the universe actually is, the currently accepted scientific number is 13.75 billion years. At that age it would have taken 258 million monkeys typing from the beginning until now to randomly produce “To be or not to be.”
Yet Shakespeare didn’t merely write ‘To be or not to be’. He wrote:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?”…
“To be or not to be” is the beginning of one of the most famous passages in history, Hamlet’s soliloquy. It’s 276 words, 1,504 characters (including spaces and punctuation). Life’s too short to bother calculating how long it would take monkeys to produce it! Yet it’s a single speech by a single character in a single play. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost … thirty-seven plays in all. And don’t forget the sonnets!
Monkeys and typewriters, time and chance couldn’t produce Hamlet’s soliloquy, they couldn’t even get it started. How strange then to believe that they could produce the universe. Time and chance ‘comfort’ those who don’t believe in God insofar as they imagine it accounts for a universe without Him. But nothing would exist without Him. Shakespeare and Hamlet, monkeys and typewriters, you and I are here because He is there. I’ll stick with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).” and leave them with another quote from Hamlet (Act 1, scene 5):
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
*I’ve given the monkeys a break since a capital “T” is not a single keystroke but one stroke, sustained, followed by another — no way to calculate the likelihood of hitting one key and holding it down while you hit another. So for simplicity’s sake (and making their task astronomically easier) I’ve called it a single stroke.
August 27th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Wow! Now I can appreciate Shakespeare. I have always wondered what the big deal was:)
August 31st, 2009 at 9:40 am
Big numbers fuzz our brain. Thanks for putting this debate into context. Too often we give into what an expert says. “Of course it makes senses that, if we have enough time slim could turn into a human being.” We can’t grasp 3.5 quintillion and that’s what they count on.