Evolution: chance and random mutations (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 08, 2024, 22:52 (12 days ago) @ David Turell

Any chance for coherence?:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematical-case-for-monkeys-producing-...

"In one of the most bizarre research experiments in the history of mathematics, researchers at the University of Plymouth in England gave six Celebes crested macaques at the nearby Paignton Zoo a keyboard. From May 1 to June 22, 2002, the animals let off steam by banging at the keys. The letters they typed were transmitted to the Internet. The scientists’ aim was to test the “infinite monkey theorem”: the idea that a monkey typing randomly on a keyboard will, after an infinite amount of time, produce every conceivable text—including the complete works of Shakespeare.

"But—surprise, surprise—the primates’ poetry fell short. After more than seven weeks, the macaques produced only one five-page document, consisting almost entirely of the letter “S.” The researchers nonetheless released the result as a book.

"In defense of Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan—the six macaques who participated in this experiment—they did not have an infinite amount of time for their work. Still, the result was sobering. It seems highly questionable that these monkeys would have produced Hamlet or the “Scottish play.”

"Although the study in no way disproved the infinite monkey theorem, it showed that monkeys are not necessarily ideal candidates for generating random content in the way the theorem’s creator had assumed. The infinite monkey theorem owes its name to mathematician Émile Borel, who used the animals metaphorically to illustrate his theory of probability in 1913. The ideas behind the theorem are much older, however.

***

"In 2024 data analyst Ergon Cugler de Moraes Silva of the University of São Paulo in Brazil wanted to find out how long it would take, on average, to actually obtain a work by Shakespeare by chance. Instead of monkeys, he programmed a character generator. As described in a preprint paper, his technique was designed to rapidly spit out several hundred pseudorandom spaces, punctuation and letters (in both upper and lower case) each second until a famous sentence from Hamlet appeared: “To be, or not to be, that is the Question” (including the spaces).

"Cugler proceeded in several steps. First, he examined how long it takes on average to find “T” in isolation. He repeated that procedure 10 times and then recorded the average time and number of characters required to generate the desired output. Then he repeated this procedure to determine how long it would take to randomly generate “To” and then did so again for “To” followed by a space, and so forth.

***

"Cugler’s calculation showed that it would take an extreme amount of patience for “To be, or not to be, that is the Question” to appear: about 2.68 x 1069 characters would have to be generated, which would take about 2.95 x 1066 seconds, or 9.35 x 1058 years.

"Since our universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, we would have to wait nearly 7 x 1048 times as long as the time that has passed between the big bang and today. And all this just to produce a single sentence from Hamlet by chance. In this respect, Cicero was right: it is very unlikely that chance will produce even a single readable verse of a poem—or any other text—after a finite amount of time."

Comment: Darwin's chance mutation theory is a dead end, as shown here mathematically.