I just received the following from e-skeptic (www.skeptic.com), but somehow it does not feel right.
It is about the old argument against Darwinian evolution, about how long it would take a monkey to type Hamlet by hitting random keys.
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DARWIN, HAMLET, AND HOW EVOLUTION WORKS: AN INTERESTING (BUT NOT UNEXPECTED) COINCIDENCE
By Michael Shermer
Here is an interesting coincidence on Darwin, Hamlet, and how evolution works, that itself needs no "intelligent designer" to explain.
In the latest issue of Scientific American, the Editor-in-Chief John Rennie wrote a brilliant article entitled "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense," debunking creationist arguments
(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EED
F&pageNumber=4&catID=2). In that article he used an example from my book, Why People Believe Weird Things, from Chapter 10 "Confronting Creationists: Twenty-Five Creationist Arguments, Twenty-Five Evolutionist Answers" (also published as a separate pamphlet and available at www.skeptic.com). In that chapter I cite a computer program designed and run by a friend and colleague
of mine when I was teaching at Glendale College, Richard Hardison, on how long it would take a monkey to randomly type "To be or not to be." It would take 26 to the power of 13 trials for success, which is 16 times as great as the total number of seconds that have elapsed in the 4.5 billion years of our solar system. But Hardison designed a computer program that acts like natural selection: it preserved the gains and eradicated the mistakes. In other
words, the computer "selected" for or against letters as they were randomly produced (if "T" preserve, if "Z" skip), and took an average of only 335.2 trials to produce the sequence TOBEORNOTTOBE. It took only 90 seconds.
Hardison calculated that the entire Hamlet play could be done in 4.5 days.
This appeared in Richard Hardison's spiral-bound course reading material in 1984 for a course he and I co-taught on the history of great ideas; it was then published in 1985 in book form as "Upon the Shoulders of Giants," (University Press of America) published in a second edition in 1988 (as cited in my own book).
If that computer sequence sounds familiar to readers, it is because Richard Dawkins did something very similar in his book The Blind Watchmaker, except he used a different phrase--"Methinks it is like a weasel"--completely independent of Hardison, and neither one of them knew about the other's program. Dawkins book came out in 1986; he produced his program in 1984. There is no way he could have known about Hardison's work because it wasn't
published in any form that would have been available to anyone but the students in our class. And Hardison didn't know about Dawkins' program.
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I think this program is not a convincing argument for Darwinian evolution, because survival of a sentence depends on whether a letter exists in a predifined final design -- it demonstrates only a kind of teleological evolution. They would have to design a more relevant program.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25610>
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