Emmanuel Baptist Church • 1530 Old Highway 12 •
Starkville, Mississippi 39759
Phone: 662-324-1000
• email:
EmmanuelMSU@bellsouth.net
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Six Monkeys Typing - And a Partridge in a Pear Tree Gerald McKibben Soon after the appearance of Charles Darwin’s famous book On the Origin of Species, in 1859, there was an evolution debate in London between Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, Anglican Bishop of Oxford. Huxley coined the word ‘agnostic’ and is considered by some to have been more influential in promoting Darwin’s beliefs than Darwin himself; in fact he was called “Darwin’s Bulldog”. During the course of the debate, the flamboyant Huxley made his famous statement to the effect that six eternal monkeys (I think he said apes) with six eternal typewriters, given an endless supply of paper and ink, could, by random typing, eventually type out a Shakespearean sonnet, or even the entire Book of Psalms. Of course this was stated in support of the contention that any required combinations of matter could, given enough time, result from random chance. There is some uncertainty about some details of Huxley’s statement – some point out that typewriters were not generally available at the time of the debate, for example. Regardless, many still believe that the monkeys, given the constraints Huxley proposed, would eventually stumble upon the right combination of letters, punctuation marks and spaces to type out the mentioned documents. And this flawed logic is still believed by many to be sufficient proof that molecules can turn into man, given enough time. It is characteristic of the evolution dogma that statements made by scientists in support of evolution are often taken at face value, without further investigation. That’s why many people today believe Huxley’s little monkey scenario to be reasonable. Yet several writers have shown it to be totally impossible 1,2,3,4. My analysis below is somewhat similar to that of others. (If you don’t care for the math you can skip to the last paragraph). I assumed that there are 50 keys on a typewriter keyboard, excluding capital letters, and I generously allowed one super-monkey to do 2 keystrokes/sec, 8 hrs/day, 365.25 days/ year. I started with the first word of the First Psalm; "Blessed", which has 8 characters if you include a following space. There is, on average, one chance in 508 attempts (an attempt being defined as a random typing of 8 characters), of typing this word. This is based on the Multiplication Rule of probability. Converting ‘attempts’ to seconds, at 2 keystrokes/sec X 6 monkeys = 12 keystrokes/second. Multiplying 1 sec/12 keystrokes by 8 keystrokes/‘attempt’ gives 2/3 sec/attempt. Multiplying this by 508 gives 2.60 X 1013 seconds. Divide this by 1.05 X 107 seconds/year (using 8-hour days) = 2,480,000 years, on average, for six monkeys to type out, by chance, only the first word of Psalm 1. I only went as far as the first phrase of this Psalm, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the ungodly”, 62 characters. Time required would be (5062 * 62/12 seconds) / 1.057 X 107 sec/yr = 1.07 X 1099 years, or 107 followed by 97 zeros. It is perhaps worth noting that the number 1 followed by 100 zeros is called a googol (not to be confused with Google, the internet search engine, that got its name from the term), and there are not considered to be this many atoms in the entire universe. It is a totally incomprehensible number; it’s 1.5 X 1010 inches from the earth to the moon. According to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia, there are 7 X 1027 atoms in the human body. And if you multiply this number by 6.6 billion (the total population on earth), you get a number that is only an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the number representing the time required. And, besides, the evolutionists believe the earth to be ‘only’ 4.6 X 109 years old. So an appropriate response to Huxley’s claim is – No they couldn’t. It’s not possible. John wrote “All things were made through Him [Jesus], and without Him nothing was made that was made”. Yes, and that includes the partridge and the pear tree. References:
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