The Parable of the Monkeys

Eddington, 1929

... If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

A. S. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures, 1927. New York: Macmillan, 1929, page 72.

Koestler, 1972

Neo-Darwinism does indeed carry the nineteenth-century brand of materialism to its extreme limits--to the proverbial monkey at the typewriter, hitting by pure chance on the proper keys to produce a Shakespeare sonnet.

Arthur Koestler. The Case of the Midwife Toad, New York, 1972, page 30.

Joshua Coxwell, 1995

A potential source of confusion is the idea of evolution having a ``target;'' we have normally combined this activity with others, such as Selection in Action, to address this. Cumulative SelectionOne of the most frequent arguments one hears against the theory of evolution is that complex forms and behaviors simply couldn't have evolved by ``random chance'' alone. The point we must often get across to students is that evolution does not, in fact, work this way; change is cumulative. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, dispels the myth of random chance by using the very metaphor that opponents of evolution often turn to: the monkey at the typewriter. This program models his suggestion that, were a monkey allowed to type random letters, he would produce a work of Shakespeare very quickly if letters he happened to type in the right places were preserved with each attempt. With this program, students type in a phrase of their choosing and observe how long a random phrase takes to ``evolve'' into their target phrase. Below are some sample investigations...

Joshua Coxwell, http://biology.uoregon.edu/Biology_WWW/BSL/Cum_Sel.html

Ostrov, 1994

A cat can collaborate with one intelligent mouse to produce an infinite number of literary works on a computer. Unlike a monkey, who needs a multitude of collaborators to produce one Shakespearian work on a typewriter.

Hilary Ostrov, 1994. http://haven.uniserve.com/~hostrov/cats.html

Carrie, 19??

MacDonald :
My dear man I wish you were brighter
you speak like a monkey at a typewriter

carrie@ee.umanitoba.ca MacDavis! http://www.ee.umanitoba.ca/~carrie/MACDAVIS/24.html

David Arthur Manning, 1995?

If a hen and a half can lay an egg in a half in a day in a half, 
     how many days would it take a furry eyed chihuahua to pick the 
     seeds out of twenty bell peppers using the keys from that 
     hypothetical monkey's typewriter who is randomly striking out keys 
     in order to type out the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

http://www.dtcc.edu/~m63/texts/finger

Anon, 1995

Animals have no spiritual development. Their species do not advance or grow in intellect. As animals were thousands of years ago, so they are today. If a monkey is left with a typewriter for a hundred years, he will not produce a single intelligent sentence. Compare and contrast this static existence with the life of man, which is one of perpetual growth of character and pursuit of spiritual goals....

Why a Jewish Burial? http://www.jer1.co.il/orgs/pirchei/bur3.htm

Michael XXX, 1995

However, humans have been around for quite some time, and like the monkey-typewriter cliche, people have stumbled upon elaborate methods to trigger the spiritual emotion. These methods...

95mjp@williams.edu Religion as a function of the brain http://www.cs.williams.edu/~95mjp/religion.html

Tom Solomon, 1996

Remember that old saying, ``give a million monkeys a million typewriters and a thousand years and they'll give you Shakespeare?'' Well, some say USENET is their first draft. It's nowhere near Shakespeare, but many of the Frequently Asked Question files (FAQS) are excellent sources of information. An extremely eclectic range of topics are covered--from computer programming to training a puppy, meteorology to Courtney Love.

Sweet Briar College Library, Home Page. http://www.cochran.sbc.edu/

Houghton, 19XX

Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.

Blair Houghton. [Quoted in Adam Rifkin, http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/MSGLIST/MsgList]

Fahey, 1995

Imagine the utter dismay and consternation in the scientific community if, after having come all that way, the finger of the key-thumping monkey was off, just a measly once and by hitting a key just one row too high on the QWERTY keyboard, so that Malcolm is ``drown'd'' rather than ``crown'd'' at Scone. It is an interesting question whether the monkey, by hitting one row too high but coming up with a perfectly acceptable word, has screwed up Macbeth worse than if it had missed either to the left or the right and typed ``xrown'd'' or ``vrown'd.'' I betcha you are now looking down at your keyboard to see where the letters c, d, x, and v are located

Stanley, 1995

The most succinct answer is possibly the observation of the French playwright Moliere.

``Writing is like prostitution. First you do for the love of it, Then you do it for a few friends, And finally you do for money.''

The June 1980 Esquire magazine had a monkey sitting at a typewriter. The lettering across the cover asked, ``Is anyone out there not writing a screenplay?''

R. R. Collier, 1995?

Finally, other people were reminded of the library in Jorge Luis Borges' story ``The Library Of Babel'', where a vast universe is described which contains all possible books (assuming a finite alphabet and a fixed book size the number of all possible books is mindbogglingly huge, but finite) -- in random order. Most books in such a library would appear written by the `monkey and typewriter' brigade, but all the coherent books, whether actually written or not, are in there as well.

R.R.Collier. http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~shadow/smalgods.htm

Buettner, 1995

Imagine that you're in a cave a mile underground and you just dropped and broke your flashlight.
Now, imagine complete darkness. Not close-your-eyes darkness or that of a moonless night but a darkness so absolute that your can wave your hand an inch in front of your face and see nothing. The only sound is your heart thumping and blood coursing through your ears. You're in a place so timeless that the centuries tick past like seconds. If you were lost, your chances being found or feeling your way out are about as good as a monkey banging on a typewriter and accidentally writing Hamlet. You drop to your knees and run your fingers over the limestone like a pianist playing rock and roll. Nothing. One thought goes through your mind: I'VE GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE!

Questions:

1. Was Eddington the first?
2. Why settle for less than the whole British Museum?
3. Why settle for less than an army of monkeys?
4. See if you can collect versions refering to other works by Shakespeare.

Acknowledgements