Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [83]
Thank you for clearing up the mystery. Yes, the coincidence is fascinating. But it is not all that surprising, and you have spotted that it makes a good lesson in paranormal debunking. Once one has grasped (from Darwin) the paramount importance of ratcheted cumulative selection when faced with the Argument from Statistical Improbability, one’s thoughts naturally turn to the famous monkeys who have so often been used to dramatise that Argument. It becomes the obvious simulation to do, to get the point across to doubters. It can easily be done with a little BASIC program, and that is what both Hardison and I did, at what must have been almost exactly the same time, 1984 or 1985. As for the superficial details, those pesky monkeys have always typed Shakespeare. Hamlet is his most famous play. To Be or Not to Be is the most famous passage from that play. I would probably have chosen it myself, except that I thought the dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius on chance resemblances in clouds would make a neat intro: hence “Methinks it is like a Weasel.”
When Hardison read Dawkins’s reply in Skeptic Vol. 9, No. 4, he wrote me:
Incidentally, I never felt that the TOBEORNOTTOBE example was entirely original with me. Bob Newhart, the comic, did a very nice skit in which he proposed an infinite number of monkeys working with an infinite number of typewriters, and then he realized that he would also need an infinite number of “inspectors” looking over the shoulders of the monkeys to see if anything meaningful occurred. Newhart then put himself into the role of one of these inspectors, spending another boring day and finding nothing. “Dum de dum de dum . . . Boring . . . Oh . . . Hey, Charlie, I think I have one. Let’s see, yeah. ‘To Be Or Not To Be, that is the acxrotphoeic.’” I simply realized that Bob’s humor might be a useful way of helping students to comprehend the selective nature of the “struggle for survival.” So you see that my contribution was minimal.
52. Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2000).
53. Stephen Jay Gould, “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!),” Natural History (March 2000).
54. Isaac Asimov, foreword to D. Goldsmith (ed.), Scientists Confront Velikovsky (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 7–15. In his book Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky proposed a radical theory of planetary history in which the planets went careening through the solar system, impacting one another like so many billiard balls, all in ancient human history and recorded in the myths of peoples around the world, which became the primary data source for Velikovsky.
5. Science under Attack
1. Michael Shermer, “The Chaos of History,” Nonlinear Science Today Vol. 2, No. 4 (1993), pp. 1–13; “Exorcising LaPlace’s Demon: Chaos and Antichaos, History and Metahistory,” History and Theory Vol. 34, No. 1 (1995), pp. 59–83; “Chaos Theory,” in D. R. Woolf (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Historiography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996); “The Crooked Timber of History: History Is Complex and Often Chaotic. Can We Use This to Better Understand the Past?” Complexity Vol. 2, No. 6 (July–August 1997), pp. 23–29.
2. Michael Shermer, Denying History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
3. Lynn Margulis, M. F. Dolan, and R. Guerrero, “The Chimeric Eukaryote: Origin of the Nucleus from the Karyomastigonts in Amitochondriate Protists,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences No. 97 (2002), pp. 6954–59. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press,