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A Short Refutation of Natural Selection in Evolution
The famous example of monkeys reproducing Shakespeare as illustration of the role played by chance in biological evolution has often been attributed to T. H. Huxley, although that is probably not true. In fact the analogy goes back at least as far as Aristotle – in a different context and without the typewriter. It goes like this:
If a thousand immortal monkeys sit down at a thousand indestructible typewriters, they would eventually produce, along with a lot of nonsense of course, all the works of Shakespeare. Theoretically, it answers the question: How could natural selection cause Mozart's music and Einstein's thoughts, for example, or even “the sun comes up like thunder over China 'cross the bay” to come into being? Words like “immortal” and “indestructible” infer infinity, and infinity is such an unimaginably long time that all those things, including Shakespeare's works, would be produced within it – by pure chance and the law of averages, with no hand of God or intelligent agent of any kind required (or desired, thank you).
The problem for the theory is that neither immortal monkeys nor indestructible typewriters (or computers) exist, or have ever existed or will ever exist, even until infinity.
How do I know this? you may ask. Trust me, I may reply.
However, the effect of the thought experiment being false requires that the premise of natural selection also be false – aside from the fact that the expression “natural selection” is an oxymoron of the worst kind, for selection, from the verb “to select”, is an action word requiring an intelligent acting agent. Chance cannot select, it merely happens. But that's an aside. The refutation of natural selection in evolution (not a refutation of evolution as such) consists in that if it were true then the immortal monkey trick would have to be true as well. If the theories of evolution and relativity as well as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Anna Netrebko are the culmination of billions of years of chance mutations, then not only is there no reason to assume that the team of chimps would not reproduce all the works of Shakespeare, but they must necessarily do so.
But even if for the sake of argument we accept that absurdity, the chimps would only type the works of Shakespeare, not Shakespeare himself – and without the creator of the play there is no play. And the play's the thing.
Frank Thomas Smith
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