How Many Monkeys Does it Take to Write the Bible?
I’ll give you the answer up front: an infinite number of them.
The chances are 100% that ONE of an infinite number of monkeys will write the Bible, along with another monkey that will write My Pet Goat, another penning The Origin of Species and yet another scrawling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Also, how many of you would attribute some special qualities to that monkey, that somehow, it possesses some amazing skill the others do not? Is it a better monkey? How many of you think that that SAME monkey that wrote the Bible would turn around and write the Koran? Would you bet a million dollars on it?
Image Credit: Olivander
Technorati Tags: monkeys on typewriters, randomness
One way to get rid of uncertainty is to throw an infinite number of things at it (another is to delude yourself). If there is less than an infinite number of something, then you are prone to randomness: there exists the possibility that whatever just happened did so by accident.
And we live in a finite universe.
Good (and bad) things may (but of course not always) happen to us by accident.
It isn’t always true that a scientist makes a discovery because he’s smarter or has more training than anyone else, or that a rich person is more ‘business saavy’ than those around him with less money.
Randomness is everywhere, (we may as well call the fabric of the universe spacechancetime) and it’s easy to take credit for something that may have happened to you by chance by attributing the positive outcome to some skill you have, some cleverness that you possess that others do not.
Most people wouldn’t consider the possibility that they just got lucky.
While randomness is pervasive, it’s not intense, I’m not arguing that everything that happens to us is a chance event, of course there is cause an effect. We should weight the role of chance accordingly. I would argue though, that human beings don’t weight it enough. So does this guy:
Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident–but we don’t see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them.
…
If the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to find things “by accident,” outside the original plan. Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research.
…
It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don’t know it. We truly live under the illusion of order believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past–but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future. (Full Article)
I’m beginning to think I don’t recognize often enough the role randomness plays in our universe. But randomness is unsettling, it makes me uncomfortable, it feels so out of control somehow.
As humans, we are continually thinking about how something could have happened and attempt to assign some cause for it. Very natural, I do it hundreds of times a day. I don’t often say that things happen by chance though (at least not very often).
We attribute our successes to our skills:
“Man, how did you discover that? You must be a genius!”
“Yeah, well, *sniff* I knew there must be something there and that I’d find it if I just stared at it long enough.”
But our failures?
“Umm, I had no way of knowing that earthquake would happen on that day, the models weren’t written for a 100,000 year event like this.”
See? There’s chance now.
It’s very natural for us to try and find a causal relationship among the events that happen to us, and most of the time we find one. But not always, and I admit it is unsettling. I have caught myself more than once, after a bad thing has happened to me saying things like:
“Oh I’m not drinking out of that glass again, last time I did that a rock fell on my head.”
“The last time I sat in this chair, the Broncos lost.”
(The Broncos losing may not be a random event, in fact that happens all too often, but the connection my brain made as to the cause is very illustrative of the kind of thinking I’m talking about.)
After I slap myself, I realize this is natural behavior (tell me you’ve never wanted to walk down the street where you found twenty dollars a second time) . Things need to have a cause, and when we can’t find one what we come up with sometimes is hilarious.
I will try to keep in mind that while skills, knowledge, expertise, and education can help us get things done, reduce our exposure to risky things, help us make discoveries and improve our lives, sometimes we just get lucky.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: skewed perspective
0 opinions for How Many Monkeys Does it Take to Write the Bible?
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: