How long will monkeys typing randomly on typewriters take to produce the works of Shakespeare? That’s been a way of thinking about Darwinian evolution since who knows where. In 2002, researches at the Paignton Zoo in England decided to find out. They left a computer terminal in a cage with six monkeys. The results: Mike Phillips, one of the researches, said “They pressed a lot of S’s” and “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.” That is not even to mention the regular urination and defecation on the keyboard. After a month, the monkeys had produced about 5 pages of material, with very little resemblance to Shakespeare.
Nothing daunted, Richard Dawkins trots out the the monkeys in describing a computer experiment that transformed a nonsensical string of letters into Hamlet’s “Methinks it is like a weasel.” He tries to show that while it is highly improbable that this sentence could be produced at random in one moment, it can be produced through a series of intermediate phrases that approximate closer and closer to Shakespeare’s sentence. From a random string of letters, the computer generates the phrase in 43 generations. “Computers are a bit fast at this kind of thing than monkeys,” Dawkins comments, “but the difference really isn’t significant.”
Impressive? Not really, say Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt in their entertaining and insightful A Meaningful World (IVP, 2006). Wiker and Witt want to outdo design arguments; they want to show that the creation not only displays evidence of design, but of genius, in a way analogous to the genius displayed in Hamlet.
Dawkins’s computer analogy doesn’t work Wiker and Witt argue, for two reasons: First, “this computer knows precisely where it’s headed; it isn’t blind. It’s headed for the target phrase already programmed into the computer. Thus, the program mimics guided or teleological evolution, not Darwinian evolution.” Oops.
Second, Dawkins’s analogy doesn’t work because the intermediate stages are meaningless. For evolution to work, it’s not enough for the endpoint of a series of mutations to be functional; if the intermediate stages are not functional, then the organism won’t survive, or at least the mutation won’t last to the next generation. As Wiker and Witt put it, “the space between markedly different functional sentences is astronomically large because functionality demands real words formed into the integrated whole of the larger order of a meaningful sentence, as governed by syntax, grammar, spelling and the accepted meanings of individual words.”
In an even more devastating criticism, Wiker and Witt point out that Hamlet’s statement is part of a much larger context - the context of the play, of Shakespeare’s life, of Elizabethan theater, of Elizabethan England, etc. Dawkins is only able to contemplate a random assembly of the sentence “Methinks it is like a weasel” because he has abstracted that sentence from all context: “it’s only by ignoring the great depth of meaning found in the passage when studied in its larger context that one is able even to conceive of its being created by random processes.”
They go on to offer a brilliant discussion of the statement in the context of Hamlet: Polonius the time-server is being exposed, without realizing what’s happening; he agrees readily with Hamlet even when Hamlet changes his mind as readily as a cloud changes shapes. Polonius is the cloud blown about by political interests; he is “something like a weasel.” Contrary to Dawkins, who chooses this passages because he thinks it illustrates the fact that people see design when there is none (clouds looking like weasels), Wiker and Witt show that the scene cuts the other way: The joke is on Polonius (and Dawkins) who fail to see the design of Hamlet’s jokes that should be readily apparent.
Applied to evolutionary biology, the point is that it’s not enough to explain the generation of a single organ. Darwinian theory cannot even do that, but even if it could explain the origin of, say, the eye, it wouldn’t be explaining anything. What needs to be explained is not the single organ (or sentence) but the whole organism that gives the organ (or sentence) its function (or meaning). What needs to be explained is not the eye only, but vision .
They summarize: “if one wanted to test the power of natural selection working on random variation - bracketing off for the moment the formal demands of the larger organism - a proper computer model would have to be truly blind, requiring whole sentences and even paragraphs to emerge from a random process in a single step without any directive goal. One might image that this model is more defective than Dawkins’s model because such a computer program couldn’t possibly assemble even a single passage from Hamlet or even the ghost of an imitation of Hamlet or any other coherent passage. But the failure isn’t with the analogy but with the Darwinian mechanism. The program now maps Darwinian evolution correctly and demonstrates that Darwinian selection can’t build complex, functional organic form because, first, unlike Dawkins’s program, it can’t see its destination; and, second, it needs prohibitively large units of functional change to progress.”