Monkey versus Shakespeare. If you add enough zeros to the probability, not only does the monkey have a probability on typing the complete works without error, the monkey also has a probability for smelting iron, making the typewriter, acting out the plays and writing obnoxious reviews.
Doesn’t make it a real possibility, just one that can be calculated.
"Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") used this technique in Oxford, in 1860, while debating Samuel Wilberforce. He stated that if monkeys randomly strummed typewriter keys for a long enough time, then sooner or later Psalm 23 would be printed out. Huxley used this argument to demonstrate that life could have originated on Earth by chance. (2)
Julian Huxley (1887-1975) repeated this analogy to 'prove' that long periods of time could allow impossible evolution to occur. In his analogy, given enough time, monkeys randomly typing on typewriters could eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. (3)
Stephen Hawking used the monkey story in 1988. He proposed that if there was a horde of typing monkeys, then "very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets." (4)
When all these outlandish statements were made "... no evolutionary scientist or mathematician who knew better raised a single objection." (5) So as a result, these statements have convinced many people that 5 billion years is enough time for life to evolve on Earth.
This ruse has been very convincing because most people have difficulty comprehending very small and extremely large numbers.
Just how logical is this monkey story? In simple terms, if every square foot of the earth's surface was covered with monkeys randomly typing on typewriters, at the rate of ten characters per second (about 5 times the realistic speed) they could not do the job. Even if they typed non-stop for 30 billion years there would not be the slightest chance that one of them would type even a single five word sentence of 31 characters, with spaces and punctuation in the correct place. The probability for them to achieve this is less than one chance in a trillion. (6)
Richard Dawkins also appeals to the monkeys to convince his readers that evolution by natural selection is plausible. He believes that a thousand such monkeys could type Shakespeare's sentence, "Methinks it is like a weasel." However, the probability of them typing this six-word sentence (including spaces), is one chance in 10>39. (7)
It has been calculated that it would be statistically impossible to randomly type even the first 100 characters in Shakespeare's "Hamlet". If the monkeys typed only in lower case, including the 27 spaces in the first 100 characters, the chances are 27100 (ie. one chance in 10>143). (8)
"If each proton in the observable universe were a typing monkey (roughly 1080 in all), and they typed 500 characters per minute (faster than the fastest secretary), around the clock for 20 billion years, then all the monkeys together could make 5x1096 attempts at the characters. It would require an additional 3x1046 such universes to have an even chance at success." (9)
Recently, the reality of this last statement has been so damaging to the support for Darwinian evolution, that many evolutionists have taken up the "additional universes" scenario as a way out. They change the analogy and invent an unimaginably large number of universes that are all full of monkeys. They believe that under these new conditions, sooner or later one of the monkeys will succeed. This is the basis of the Anthropic Principle (see my lecture notes #8, "The Anthropic Principle", for a refutation of this theory).
Returning to the mathematics, Michael Behe estimates the probability of just getting the 30,000 gene pieces required for blood clotting in the right sequence as 10-18. To get the genes plus the clotting activator working together by chance has the probability of 10-36. (13)
Fred Hoyle estimates the following probabilities for chance, random arrangement of amino acids:- (14)
10>19 for a ten amino acid polypeptide
10>20 for a functional enzyme
10>130 for the histone H4 molecule
10>40,000 for all of life's 2,000 enzymes
This last value (10>40,000) shows the probability that a very, very tiny part of evolution could have happened. This probability is more unlikely than the monkey's chance typing (viz 10>143) which have been used to 'prove' evolution.
Bear in mind that Mathematical Zero is 10>50. Any value smaller than this is relegated by mathematicians to the realm of 'never happening'. [LINK]"