MONKEYING WITH SCIENCE
STATISTICAL POSSIBILITY OF EVOLUTION
by E. de Ruyter


Around 1900 it was said that given the time that has been available for evolution to take place 'anything could have happened by chance': Even a monkey tapping away on a typewriter at random might by chance have typed the title of Darwin's book on evolution:

'the origin of species.'

This sentence contains 22 characters including the spaces and full stop. Suppose the monkey's typewriter has only the 26 lower case letters, the space bar and full stop key, a total of 28 keys. Suppose our monkey can type fast, two keystrokes a second. The probability that the monkey hits the first letter, the t, correctly is one in 28 or

1/28 = 0.0357142857143

The probability that the monkey hits the second key, the h, correctly is also 0.0357142857143

According to probability theory one has to multiply these two probabilities to find the probability that the monkey hits both keys correctly.

So the probability that the monkey does that is: 0.0357142857143 x 0.0357142857143

= 0.03571428571432

The probability that our monkey types the whole title of 22 characters correctly by chance is: 0.035714285714322

= 1.45386241863-32

So the monkey has to make 1.45386241863 x 1032 keystrokes before he is once likely to type 'the origin of species' correctly by chance.

Since we supposed our monkey can type two keystrokes per second it would than take the monkey: 1.45386241863 x 1032/2 =

7.269312095 x 1031 seconds to type the sentence correctly.

Dividing this by the number of seconds in a year: 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 = 3153600 seconds.
gives:
7.269312095 x 1031 / 3153600 = 2.305083744 x 1024 years,
or expressed in billions:
2.305083744 x 1024 x 1,000,000,000,000 = 2,305,083,744,000,000 billion,
or over

2.3 million billion billion years.

It would take the monkey that long to once, by chance, type the above sentence correctly.

However, scientists believe the earth is only 4.5 billion years old.

The earth should therefore have existed: 2,305,083,744,000,000 /4.5
= 5.12240832 x 1014

or 512,2480.8 billion times longer than it has according to modern science.
That is the earth should have existed over half a million billion times longer for the monkey to once type by chance the above 22 character sentence correctly.

'God' is the answer

In reality things are even worse since scientists believe that life developed in the sea. However, seas only began to form on earth about 3.5 billion years ago according to scientific theories 1. So there have even been a billion fewer years available for the evolution of life.

The sequence of amino acids in a single strand of DNA and the configuration of their atoms is much more complex than the above 22 character sentence. So it follows logically and scientifically that there would not have been enough time for DNA to 'evolve by chance' in the mere 4.5 billion years the earth has existed.

After DNA had finally evolved all the other chemicals like proteins, plants, animals and man would have had to evolve on earth by chance in a mere 4.5 or 3.5 billion years which is clearly impossible.

How likely is it then that the whole universe with all its galaxies and chains of supergalaxies could have 'evolved by chance' in the mere 10 to 20 billion years modern scientists believe the universe is old 2? This too is clearly impossible.

The above proves that chance evolution could not have brought the earth and universe into existence in the time available. So the belief that there must be another cause for the universe which people since millennia have called 'God', does not seem to be so 'crazy' after all. Even nations who have believed, and still believe, in a multitude of gods, usually believe in one supreme god.

What we really don't know

The theory of evolution has not yet been scientifically proved like, for instance, the existence of the moon and planets in their orbits. Evolution is still an hypothesis, an assumption, yet to be proved by scientific tests.

Human life is simply too short for scientists to test the hypothesis of evolution.

Even in a science as accurate as astronomy of the solar system some theories have proved incorrect since space exploration by man and unmanned space probes. Some fifty years ago scientists were sure Venus was a cold planet. Scientific measurements by unmanned Venus probes have shown this neighbour planet to earth to be an extremely hot planet.

How then do we really know what goes on inside stars that are many light years away and how can we think we know what happened at the start of the universe, now supposed to have occurred 10 to 20 billion years ago? Scientific pronouncements about these things are not really proven scientific theories, they are hypotheses, scientific assumptions.

The general public, however, believes that scientists have proved their ideas about stars, galaxies, the 'big bang', and evolution to be correct. This is a belief.

(When I studied medicine after World War II heard the story of the 'typing monkey' again as an indicator that in the enormous amount of time available for it chance evolution could certainly have happened. However, none of our lecturers actually worked out how much time the monkey would have needed to just type the title of Darwin's book. Most non-mathematical lecturers at the time know very little about statistics. The same was true for most lecturers at the turn of the century. Even in the 1940s scientists knew still nothing about the complexity of DNA, to just mention one protein involved in living cells.)

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 19. p.775, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. 1993.

  2. op. cit. Vol. 17, p.603.

From "Annals Australia" October 1995

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