Monkey madness

by David Catchpoole

Wikimedia commons/Henrik Ishihara

Prominent evolutionist Julian Huxley said that, given enough time, monkeys typing randomly could eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare.

When arguing that life could have arisen by chance, evolutionists will often state that—given enough time—anything could happen, regardless of how improbable it might seem.1 For example, prominent evolutionist Julian Huxley (1887–1975) said that, given enough time, monkeys typing randomly could eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare.2

Since then, others too, such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, have made similar pronouncements about monkeys’ random typing being able to produce one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or at least a sentence from one of his plays.

But when Plymouth University (UK) researchers installed a keyboard and computer screen in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques, it didn’t result in a nicely typed set of the complete works of Shakespeare. Neither did they get a sonnet. Nor even a single word of Shakespeare.

No, when the researchers gave six monkeys one computer for a month, what they got was … a mess.3

Researchers offered Sulawesi crested macaques at Paignton Zoo an opportunity to type out a Shakespearean sonnet—but they didn’t get a single word. Wikimedia commons/Daily Mail

The first thing the lead male did was to find a stone and start bashing the computer with it. Subsequently, the younger ones came and pressed some of the keys. But most of the macaques’ time was spent sitting or jumping on the computer, or using it as a toilet. (The computer was protected by a transparent plastic covering in such a way that the monkeys could nevertheless hit the keys with their fingers.) After one month, the monkeys had produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter ‘S’. But there was not a single recognizable word in sight. The letter ‘A’ was the only vowel to be used, and it did not make an appearance until page 4.

Most of the macaques’ time was spent sitting or jumping on the computer, or using it as a toilet.

Despite the outcome being gobbledegook, the combined efforts of monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan have been made available for sale in a limited edition book, bound in the style of a Shakespearean play, entitled Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare.4,5

Towards Shakespeare? Hardly—evidence for evolution, the monkeys’ performance certainly isn’t. And, as calculations have shown, even if monkeys could type randomly at a rate of one key-strike per second, without ever stopping, then to get a simple line of intelligible text would take many billions of times longer than the assumed evolutionary age of the universe.1

Addressing the idea that time plus chance could have created life, Sir Fred Hoyle said, ‘Now imagine 1050 blind persons [that’s 100,000 billion billion billion billion billion people—standing shoulder to shoulder, they would more than fill our entire planetary system] each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling [random variation] of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.’ [Emphasis added.]