RE: By chance?
January 24, 2020 at 2:45 pm
(This post was last modified: January 24, 2020 at 2:46 pm by BrianSoddingBoru4.)
(January 24, 2020 at 11:39 am)IMister Agenda Wrote: Methinks it is like a weasel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program
Another way to envision the experiment (Gould’s, I think) is as follows:
For every bash the monkey has at the keyboard, there is a 1 in 27 chance that the first key it hits will be ‘M’. Since the analogy is to biochemical evolution, we can establish that only ‘E’ can follow ‘M’, just as certain chemicals only bond with other chemicals (which is why we don’t get neon oxides or gold silicates). Thus, the keyboard will lock up until the monkey hits ‘E’, then ‘T’ and so on. The monkey is still making random keystrokes (analogous to mutations) but they can only be useful in ways the keyboard allows (analogous to selection).
Gould, I’m sure, preferred to look at it this way as it’s more friendly to punk-eek, but it doesn’t change the overall point, which is that evolution isn’t nearly so fantastically unlikely as creationists would have us think.
Boru