The paper doesn’t say that either. They only call the original theorem misleading. I understood that their point is the same as yours - that infinity won’t happen in a finite time period.
> The long-established result of the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is correct, but misleading.
> Non-trivial text generation during the lifespan of our universe is almost certainly impossible.
> The Finite Monkeys case shows there will never be sufficient resources to generate Shakespeare.
I don’t see how the original is misleading. The word “infinite” isn’t hidden or anything… unless the definition of infinite is misleading but I think it’s use here is pretty clear.
“Infinity” on its own is clear, but in tandem with monkeys it could get confusing.
If you remember that a monkey here is also a theoretical construct then I guess all is fine. But otherwise monkeys need at least a universe to function and that is finite.
Perhaps it would have been seen as less confusing if it was a demon[1] that enters random letters instead.
You're comparing chalk and cheese to an extent, a perfect copy of Shakespeare's work can exist in exactly one way but DNA isn't required to be copied perfectly, DNA can change without necessarily killing the organism or otherwise rendering it unable to reproduce. Additionally evolution is not a random process, while mutations are random the process by which the mutations are selected is not - it depends on whether the mutation is a reproductive advantage for the organism in the context of their ecological niche. Most mutations are going to be neutral or disadvantageous so they won't be selected. Additionally you're not mutating the whole DNA sequence at once, just parts of it.
I would like to see someone use the most generous parameters possible and simulate the statistics of the first cple amino acids evolving into our homo sapiens sapiens chromosome set randomly over the course of just 4b years.
(selection is irrelevant here; we could even just model it as always-select-for-beneficial-mutation for extra graciousness).
Mind you, even if a beneficient mutation occurs, it is still not guaranteed to be passed onto the next generation. It would have to randomly occur over and over again.
I'm not confident that it's gonna be very convincingly in favour of the random mutation model.
>Mind you, even if a beneficient mutation occurs, it is still not guaranteed to be passed onto the next generation. It would have to randomly occur over and over again.
Why would it have to re-occur again and again? If the mutation is beneficial to the reproductive success of an organism, by definition their mutation will be passed on with no need for it to occur again by chance. The percentage of the population with the mutation would grow, potentially very quickly if it was a strong advantage over the previous generations. You're also characterising evolution as if to get from amoebas to humans you require a series of billions of independent coin-flips which isn't an accurate model, rather each generation is building on that which preceded it. Take the eye as an organ for example, it predates humanity by a very long time and was not independently evolved by humans - there was no need for it to have been since those genes already existed.
The predictions of evolution are generally supported by the available evidence at any rate, if you'd like to overturn it you'll have to propose a theory that explains the evidence more compellingly.
> Why would it have to re-occur again and again? If the mutation is beneficial to the reproductive success of an organism, by definition their mutation will be passed on with no need for it to occur again by chance.
Are you certain this is correct? An individual with a genetic mutation does not necessarily pass it down to its offspring, even if it was beneficial, in my understanding. So there is a probability p of passing it down and 1-p of not doing so.
In the latter case, the beneficial mutation is lost. Now the way evolutionists seem to "solve" this is by conjecturing that since the mutation is beneficial, it will arise in multiple individuals independently and eventually get passed down. Even if I grant this, it makes the statistics once again much more unlikely for this to occur.
> The predictions of evolution are generally supported by the available evidence at any rate ...
Depends which subarea of evolution. No actual speciation based on random mutation has ever been observed (let alone ones predicted by evolution) as far as I'm aware.
Micro-evolution or expression of previously not-expressed but already present genes is a different topic, and not something I have issues with.
All I say is evolution is at best insufficient to explain us. And we haven't even touched consciousness.
>Are you certain this is correct? An individual with a genetic mutation does not necessarily pass it down to its offspring, even if it was beneficial, in my understanding. So there is a probability p of passing it down and 1-p of not doing so.
That value for p is still going to be considerably greater for the gene to be passed on than the probability of that gene arising again randomly through mutation though. Consider the example of eye colour for example, chances are two brown-eyed parents are going to have brown-eyed children too - certainly a greater probability than a random mutation will intervene to make their eyes purple.
>Depends which subarea of evolution. No actual speciation based on random mutation has ever been observed (let alone ones predicted by evolution) as far as I'm aware.
There have been empirical studies of species separating and the mosquitoes on the London Underground are a good example, surface-dwelling mosquitoes cannot interbreed with those from the tunnels. At any rate it's actually quite a difficult thing to study since we're not looking at a binary situation of 'they have gene x now and therefore they're a separate species', that's not how evolution works and I don't think any biologist would claim this to be the case. At the end of the day species are human classifications made based on scientific observation rather than perfect formal categories, we define a species to be that which cannot interbreed with another and produce fertile offspring but that's our classification not nature's - species diverge gradually after taking many different evolutionary paths rather than there being a binary instant they're separate from each-other. The classification of species can only ever be so good because it's attempting to draw a fixed line on a moving canvas.
I think when arguing against the theory of evolution it's tempting to make arguments along the lines that each species is assigned some kind of intangible Platonic form towards which evolution must work but this isn't the case at all, there's no law of nature that says one species has to take x form and another must take y form. There's no Platonic cat which makes a cat a cat rather than a dog or a goldfish, a cat is merely one of the many possible organisms that can fill the ecological niche that cats occupy; and we classify them with our imperfect system of biological classification. I think it's putting the cart before the horse to essentially say that evolution is a flawed theory because our system of categorising species doesn't have the resolution to capture the exact moment species diverge from each-other.
>Micro-evolution or expression of previously not-expressed but already present genes is a different topic, and not something I have issues with.
Micro-evolution versus macro-evolution is a bit of an old canard in my opinion, the idea that they're separate processes rather than a continuum of the same process doesn't really exist outside of creationism which in my opinion is a much more difficult theory of our origins to argue than evolution. I spent some of my early life as a creationist so I'm not unfamiliar with its nuances, but personally I'm yet to hear a creationist argument that is particularly compelling to people who aren't already invested in the existence of a Creator rather than approaching the subject neutrally.
> All I say is evolution is at best insufficient to explain us. And we haven't even touched consciousness.
Consciousness is definitely a much more interesting problem in my opinion, and there's definitely no good theories of consciousness yet as far as I'm concerned. I think the notion of qualia in particular poses a lot of difficulties for a purely materialistic understanding of consciousness for example.
Also wouldn’t a DNA sequence get more likely as time goes on as it builds from the past and is not uniformly random? In the mokey/typewriter thought experiment no previous correct keystroke makes the next keystroke more likely to be correct. However, with DNA/life once it starts the next iteration is more likely to be better since it has the previous success to build upon.
The actual problem is upstream of that at the abiogenesis stage.
For evolutionary selection to occur the machinery for selection must exist. Specifically information storage (DNA/RNA), replication(polymerases) and actioning (transcription) all are needed, and must continue to be able to exist for long enough to matter.
Without selection pressure and inheritance you're just left with requiring a big enough universe and enough time for randomness not to matter.
The critical difference is evolutionary only needs relatively short sequences to be randomly generated, and there’s many valid sequences.
Building a book by generating a single random text string is practically impossible, but if you lock in any given word that’s correct and retry that’ll quickly get something. You’ll have most 8 letter or shorter words correct after 1 trillion runs, and many 9 letter words. It wouldn’t be done, but someone could probably read and understand the work at that point.
Further it’s possible for a few even longer words to match at that point. People think it’s unlikely that specific sequences happened randomly, but what they ignore is all the potential sequences that didn’t occur.
The many valid sequences are relatively nothing compared to the infinitely many invalid ones, right?
> You’ll have most 6 letter or shorter words correct after 1 billion tries.
You think that's "quick" for dna which is made up of billions of 6-base-sequences and for a species that can only reproduce sexually once every decade or so at best?
> many valid sequences are relatively nothing compared to the infinitely many invalid ones, right?
There’s finite invalid sequences, DNA isn’t infinitely long. It’s also not a question of valid or invalid we live with sub optimal DNA, so yea most people aren’t born with some new beneficial mutation. However, not winning the lottery isn’t the same things a dying, and even smaller wins still benefit us.
As to our long reproductive cycle, there’s a reason we share so much in common with other primates. Most of our DNA has been worked out for a long time. We share 98% of our DNA with pigs, and 85% of it is identical in mice which has practical application in drug development. Of note common ancestors were more closely related to us because both branches diverged.
Hell 60% is shared with chickens, and half of it’s shared with trees.
> only reproduce sexually once every decade or so at best?
Many sperm and fetuses die from harmful mutations, live babies are late in the process here. Also, because order doesn’t matter you get multiple chances to roll the same sequence for every birth.
PS: There’s also quite a bit of viral insertion into our DNA, it’s mostly sexual reproduction but we have some single cell ‘ancestors’ in our recent history.
> The many valid sequences are relatively nothing compared to the infinitely many invalid ones, right?
I dont know about the relative numbers but I don't think you do either? Are you begging the question or can you quantify?
> You think that's "quick" for dna which is made up of billions of 6-base-sequences and for a species that can only reproduce sexually once every decade or so at best?
We didn't start from scratch, we are very very late in the game, and the groundwork for us was laid by millions of other species that can replicate quickly, often very quickly.
Unless you believe the Earth is only six thousand years or so old, in which case we might as well leave the discussion where it is.
You are just repeating the point that was being argued against.
If the lifetime of the universe isn't enough to randomly produce Shakespeare, 3-4 billions of years are cute but useless to randomly produce anything even near as sophisticated as our 46 chromosome set.
I imagine Dawkins still just repeats the conjecture "but it's 3-4 billion years, anything can happen!"
A work of Shakespeare is a single specific target, that's why it takes so long to hit it - one letter out doesn't cut it. DNA meanwhile is a general purpose animal kit that has many billions of 'correct answers'. It's not about sophistication.
Just give them a typewriter that records the position of where the key is pressed to a million bits accuracy, convert that to a series of ASCII characters (through a hash function), and the monkeys will type very fast.
That’s really funny. Give the keyboard a big enough buffer to hold Shakespeare and flush it to the screen on startup. With infinite monkeys and therefore infinite buffers the monkeys don’t even have to type!
Yeah exactly, it's a thought experiment about infinities... Is someone going to publish a study concluding that Hilbert's Hotel couldn't be built on Earth too?
Why are people even spending money on this research? What are they trying to prove/disprove?
It's funny that so many people are confused about why this was written. The monkeys argument was originally used against the theory of evolution; "what's the probability that a monkey banging on a typewriter will type out Hamlet? It'll never happen, and that's why evolution is impossible." Then, someone made the counter-argument that given enough time, the monkey will type out Shakespeare. This paper argues that as long as the time is finite on the order of the age of our universe, the monkey will not type out Shakespeare.
That’s the whole point.