Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

Six Sulawese crested macaques made a monkey out of Charles Darwin at Plymouth University in England recently. In a project that was more performance art and publicity stunt than anything resembling empirical science, a computer was placed in the monkey display of the Paignton Zoo. Six crested macaques were permitted to have their way with the machine for a month to see what they would do with it.

The theory goes that if you give an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters sufficient time, they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. This is essentially the theoretical foundation of Darwinian evolution. Give a chaotic cocktail of primordial ooze enough time, it will eventually organize itself into everything from aardvaark to zebra. (For a delightful animation illustrating the evolution of life from the pulsating dregs in the bottom of a Coke bottle deposited by a UFO set to Ravel's Bolero, see Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo.) I have yet to see dust organize itself, but I probably haven't given it enough time. Like the chaos on my desk, entropy tends to increase without interference. Vacuuming and filing are a lot quicker, but that would involve the participation of a higher intelligence and will, something evolutionists are loathe to accept when it comes to the origin of life.

Apparantly, the monkeys had other plans for the computer than cranking out literary masterpieces. The lead male immediately took a rock and began "bashing the hell out of it," according to the report. He probably preferred Macintosh. I've had the same impulse trying to work on a PC in a Windows-based environment. Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe, and Rowan also took to urinating and defecating all over the keyboard, thereby demonstrating a higher level of utility and discernment than previously ascribed to macaques. One can only wonder what they would have done had they had Internet access.

When they finally got around to typing, the monkeys produced five pages of text consisting mostly of the letter S along with sprinklings of A,J,L, and M. Shakespeare it wasn't, but it was well within the standards of post-modern literature not to mention the writing ability of most public school graduates.

Of course, the entire experiment was scientifically flawed from the outset. Monkeys are not random letter generators. They are intelligent, social creatures who live in complex, ordered communities, use tools, gather food, take care of their young, and defend their homes - all without government assistance. We might learn a thing or two from them. A better experiment in randomness would be to load a dump truck with Scrabble alphabet tiles, then dump them out one at a time and see how long it takes to make a word or two, much less a coherent sentence with a subject and a predicate.

It seems like so much monkey business until you realize this is the central dogma of what is taught in our schools concerning the origins of the genetic code and the diversity of species in the name of evolution. Given enough time, monkeys could probably come up with a better explanation for the origin of life and the diversity of the species than sheer dumb luck spread over "billions and billions" of years.

A few years ago, researchers taught a female gorilla named Koko several hundred words in universal sign language. It was as close to Dr. Doolittle as it gets. When asked who she was, the gorilla replied, "Fine animal gorilla." At least common sense still prevails in the animal world. "The ox knows its owner; and the ass its master's crib."

I suspect that if monkeys ever learn the king's English and the vagueries of Microsoft Word, they'll probably type something like, "The fool says in his heart there is no God" and then go back to bashing the monitor with a rock and pissing on the keyboard. Or downloading free MP3 files.

To be or sssjsssslssmssssa? That remains the question.

Reprinted with permission of author from Forum Letter, July 2003, copyright 2003 by American Lutheran Publicity Bureau.