For all you Monkeys out there

What a stupid article. The "monkeys typing Shakespeare" is just an analogy. So "proving" that monkeys don't type anyway says nothing. You've just proved that a metaphor might not be something that can happen in real life. Big deal.The part that bugs me is where the author equates "low probability" with "no probability". Any one person has a pretty low chance of winning the lottery. Yet, almost every day, somebody wins the lottery. How is this possible? It's possible because there's a big difference between a low probability and no probability - in fact, it's as big as the difference between something and nothing.

Only because you (like someone who knows how probability works) are comparing the number of trials (whatever percent of the population buys lottery tickets) with the sample space (all the possible lottery tickets). That's a far cry from an argument from personal incredulity ("I just can't believe that, so it must not be true.") Sure, in the case of one thing happening once, that's probably good enough. But in the case of one improbable thing being tested over and over again, over time, the odds of any improbable thing happening rise dramatically. If you have infinite time, all improbable things occur.Now, of course, we don't have infinite time. The question is really "what improbable things could happen during the lifetime of the universe?" Luckily abiogenesis appears to be one of those things.But ultimately, I agree with you - probability isn't even a cogent argument here because we simply don't know what factors were involved in abiogenesis, so we can't set up any kind of probability after the fact.

Good analogy.