is 20 billion years enough?

[JC1]

If we take 1 million monkeys and gave each of them a typewriter and they each type one word per minute, the chance of all of them combined typing one of Shakespeare's sonnet that consist of 300 words would take them 10 X 10^50 years <-that's 10 with 50 zeros behind it...

 

"In a study published today in the journal Science, a team of researchers says the universe is between 11.2 billion and 20 billion years old."

 

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/age_universe_030103.html

 

..now the human DNA consist of 3 billion letters...how long do you think it took for it all to come about to form human life just by chance? Is 20 billion years really enough?

 

http://www.genome.gov/11006929

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

It wasn't chance. It didn't occur randomly. The mistakes were discarded quickly and the successes were kept. And human life didn't coalesce out of the goo; simple protists formed instead, with only small bits of DNA or RNA.

[bascule]

"Life results from the NON-RANDOM survival of randomly varying replicators."

 

-- Richard Dawkins

[JustStuit]

Also, monkeys aren't completely random. They would press the same keys or maybe progress into a pattern. I would guess that after a few years they would hurl the typewriter to the wall and throw feces at it.

[Sisyphus]

Might also be useful to crack open a nut or something.

[The Peon]

Gah i'm so tired of explaining to the idiots I work with that evolution is NOT RANDOM. Once life gets a foothold, even the tiniest via abiogenesis (which IMO is not random either) it's just a matter of time.

[RyanJ]

We could make a FAQ out of these threads... they seem to popup all the time.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

 

^ People need to do more research before posting

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[Sashatheman]

youll like this site

http://user.tninet.se/~ecf599g/aardasnails/java/Monkey/webpages/

 

Its always increasing monkeys typing at many keyboards.

 

the site is out of date, because noone is updating the most amount of letters . But the current amount generated is around 34 letters in a row.

just read how it works

[AL]

If we take 1 million monkeys and gave each of them a typewriter and they each type one word per minute' date=' the chance of all of them combined typing one of Shakespeare's sonnet that consist of 300 words would take them 10 X 10^50 years <-that's 10 with 50 zeros behind it...

 

"In a study published today in the journal Science, a team of researchers says the universe is between 11.2 billion and 20 billion years old."

 

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/age_universe_030103.html

 

..now the human DNA consist of 3 billion letters...how long do you think it took for it all to come about to form human life just by chance? Is 20 billion years really enough?

 

http://www.genome.gov/11006929

The monkey analogy isn't quite valid. The monkeys are expected to come up with something very specific: a Shakespearean sonnet. You then apply the argument to evolution to say that evolution is to produce something very specific: a human. Justification?

 

There is no reason to believe that evolution has an "end goal" of producing a human. All that is required for evolution to work is that it produce something which can successfully replicate. It need not be human. A more appropriate monkey analogy would be that the monkeys' writings are selected for anything which is readable, and not necessarily for Shakespeare. Suddenly the odds* are more favorable.

 

*You should also be careful not to read too heavily into using "chance," "odds," or "probability" in modeling something as being indicative of the way it behaves. Geneticists use probability to simplify predictions about how DNA will come together, but that doesn't mean DNA behaves "probabilistically." It's a chemical, and like any other, there are rules it obeys, not the least of which is that thermodynamics determines when and where it reacts.

[theMaharajah]

Let's not play God now young JC1.. unless that stands for Jesus Christ, which is highly implausable.

[J.C.MacSwell]

If you flipped a coin once every minute, how long would it take, on average, to get 100 heads in a row? (some huge number)

 

Now how long would it take, on average, to get one hundred heads in a row if you were allowed to ignore all "tails" results and continue counting heads? (199.5 minutes I think)

[Phi for All]

Is 20 billion years really enough?

Of all the anti-evolution arguments, this one has got to be the worst. Since evolution tells the YECs that 6000 years isn't enough they attempt to make waves at the other end using flawed logic and bad data. Just more of the ID "create-controversy-and-then-point-to-it" tactics.