Virtual Monkeys Write Shakespeare! - Giving Randomness a Boost

There is an old thought experiment, which I've read versions of in Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker [sic] and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which imagines thousands or millions of monkeys randomly hitting keys on a keyboard and one of them producing a work of Shakespeare by chance. The point of the thought experiment was to show that it's possible for the appearance of design to arise from randomness without a designer. The thought experiment has now apparently been 'tested' in a virtual experiment that sets millions of virtual monkeys to smashing away at virtual keyboards.

But, given just how immensely, inconceivably improbable it would be for even a million monkeys banging on keyboards for billions of years to produce one work of Shakespeare, the authors of the thought experiments realize that they can't leave it at that. The conductor of the virtual experiment knows this as well -- even the most powerful processors running pure randomness algorithms at astonishing rates wouldn't be able to run enough iterations to ever realistically arrive at Shakespeare, much less the complete works of Shakespeare.

Their solution for salvaging the analogy on behalf of evolution is to introduce 'selection' into the process, which is aware of the result that is being sought. Of course, blind material processes would have no idea what end they were working towards, and so with even the slightest bit of critical examination the analogy falls apart swiftly and fully.

Reading the BBC article this becomes glaring. The program is not a virtual simulation of randomness only. It virtually simulates the random key-strikes of million of monkeys and then compares 9-character blocks of text to a known goal -- the complete works of Shakespeare -- and keeps the blocks of text that appear somewhere in the works and disregard the rest. Where did such an ability come from? Where does the knowledge of what the desired end is come from? And even if the end was known, how would a monkey, or even a team of extremely intelligent monkeys, know how to cross-check the 9-character blocks of text against the enormous database of information that is the complete works of Shakespeare? Surely this is far beyond the capability of any monkey, any group of monkeys or any human, for that matter. It certainly is not a blind, random process of nature. Dawkins and Dennett make similar adjustments to their thought experiments, claiming that evolution can and does do something similar (which David Berlinski similarly and acutely deconstructs).

A more accurate headline would read that "Millions of Virtual Monkeys Striking Keys Randomly Can Re-Create Shakespeare, After They Give the Results Over to a Super-Computer That is Already Aware of What the Works of Shakespeare Look Like Beforehand and Which Aids in The Reconstruction". Not nearly as exciting or interesting, is it?

David B. Hart on Dawkins, Evolution and Design

This is an excerpt from the unedited version of the essay Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark. The version of the essay that appears online is truncated, presumably for length reasons by the editors of First Things. I assume that this paragraph was clipped because it is somewhat tangential to the subject of the essay, but I found it to be one of the more exhilarating parts of the essay. The full essay appears in Hart's essay collection In The Aftermath.

Richard Dawkins--unencumbered as he is by any philosophical training or aptitude--has an obliging habit of placing his largest logical errors either in the opening paragraphs or on the covers of his books. The subtitle of his already solecistically entitled The Blind Watchmaker informs us that "the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design"; a claim that seems superficially in keeping with his frequently reiterated assertion that what we find when we look at the evidence of biological evolution is precisely what we should expect to find if we assume that the entire process is governed by nothing but random chance. But, in fact, while the latter claim is true, the former is only a false inference drawn from it. It is, after all, one's prior expectations that are always at issue. For what one sees when one looks at the evidence of evolution is also what one might expect to find if one assumes that the entire process is the consequence of a transcedent intelligence drawing all things from nothingness and endowing them with form according to an internally coherent sequences of causes and a collection of magnificently intricate mathematical laws. All judgments regarding final causality--chance, design, necessity and so on--are, by virtue of their quite irreducible ultimacy, metaphysical in nature. They reflect the primordial convictions of the observer, not his impartial conclusions; they may appear to be valid deductions in the eyes of the philosophically naive, but in fact they concern that which lies outside the system of immanent causation that the material sciences investigate. ... The question of which judgments of finality are most plausible can be answered only metaphysically, for ultimately it is the question of whose primordial convictions are most rational and defensible (a standard according to which, happily, the strict materialist must always lose).

- David B. Hart, In The Aftermath

Neil deGrasse Tyson and The Worst Argument Against Design Ever

I saw a Youtube clip recently of the astrophysicist and atheist Neil deGrasse Tyson arguing against the notion that the efficiency and intricacy of the design in the universe that we observe must be attributable to a divine creator. There are many ways that opponents of the design argument attempt to respond, but this one was new to me. Tyson pointed out that human beings eat, drink and speak all using a single hole in their head. How much more efficient would it be if we had been blessed with two holes, one for gestation and one for communication. Imagine! If only Neil deGrasse Tyson were the creator of the universe, what a wonderful world this would be.

Eating and talking at the same time, without any interruption of the constant inane chatter that fills our lives. Seriously, what a lovely thought! The creator of this universe must have been smoking something when he decided it would be a good idea to make us occasionally stuff our yap-traps with sustenance. Did he not realize that we only have a limited time on this Earth, and that if we waste a great deal of it chewing, swallowing, maybe even thinking in silence, then we'll be unable to fulfill our purpose for this life which certainly must be to maximize our number-of-words-per-lifetime ratio? How shortsighted and foolish of him! No, an omnipotent being couldn't make so obvious and egregious an error, so I'm forced to conclude that no such being exists. My reasoning is exquisite, wouldn't you agree?

I believe that I have surpassed my mockery quota for the day. Suffice it to say that this argument is not only asinine, but is so in such a self-satisfied, unreflective, and arrogant manner as to be quite loathsome. Hopefully my abusive mockery made plain the ways in which the argument is utterly nonsensical, but if not, allow me to elucidate.

Tyson's argument assumes that humans are designed in a suboptimal way because our design prevents us from being able to speak incessantly. Undoubtedly Tyson also believes that the fact that the human body requires 8 hours of sleep a day is an epic tragedy--after all that's one-third of his life that is doomed to wordlessness. I know of very few humans who would admit without shame that they believe that their own words are so precious that they should never meet an occasion where they are forced into silence. Indeed there's many a fine proverb, from both East and West, that speaks of the wisdom and virtue to be found in silence. Listening, meditating, thinking, praying and, yes, eating. Not only is our value as humans not measured in the number of words we are able to utter, but there's some good reason to believe that a human's wisdom is often inversely proportional to the number of words they produce. As much as that pains me--a wordy person--to admit. If we are going to speculate as to the wisdom and efficiency of the creation then, if anything, this observation by Tyson bespeaks a profoundly thoughtful and efficient design plan of the creator. God may in fact have devised the human body in such a way--with a single hole for the dual purposes of gestation and speech--specifically to give the world some respite from the incessant, inane jabber of the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Who, in between meals, still managed to find the time to use his tragically limited number of words to formulate this preposterous argument.