This is natural selection in action. To compare it to the monkey typewriter scenario it is as if every few years or so someone puts the meaningful pages in a fireproof box and sets fire to all the rest. The action of selection is what means we don't end up with a room/world full of nonsense pages/hideous mutants. The mutants die before getting a chance to fossilise.
I recognize that you were more directly addressing his gross misconceptions about what to expect in the fossil record, but you're somewhat off on the "infinite monkeys" mistaken analogy. So this is intended much more as being for cpthiltz' edification than for disagreeing with you (what with my disagreement being on a minor point, which I feel certain you will grant).
cpthiltz, laddie*, may I refer you to Chapter 3 of Richard Dawkins'
The Blind Watchmaker? That addresses your piss-poor analogy quite well. In particular, his "Weasel" program, which directly addresses Eddington's old analogy (did you even know what that analogy had come from? Curious minds want to know!). When I first read it, I just simply could not believe it! So I put it to the test. And
it worked! So then I analyzed the probabilities involved. And what I found was that the probability for Weasel's success approached 99.9999%, making it virtually inevitable. Or as one author had put it (from memory; I'll have to track that one down): "Natural selection makes the improbable, inevitable."
I had written a page about this, but my ISP recently pulled abruptly out of the web hosting business, so I'm off-line at this time. So, quoting from my own MONKEY.HTML (since I had named my own program after Eddington's analogy). The main problem with the Eddington analogy is that it assumes single-step selection: that each and every attempt has to start from scratch. But rather, life
never ever starts from scratch, but rather it starts from its parents' generation. Did you read that? Did you understand it? Just about every creationist probability argument assumes
single-step selection, that you're trying to get a modern protein or whatever starting from scratch and just falling together. But that is
not the way that life works! Life
always,
each and every time, starts from where its parents were already at and just takes it that little bit further. Single-step selection is abysmally incapable of producing results, whereas cumulative selection is incredibly capable. Creationist arguments rely almost entirely on single-step selection, whereas
life itself uses cumulative selection. What should we expect life to produce, then?
quote:
In single-step selection, the entire final product is generated at one time and must match the target in order to succeed. If it fails, then the next trial must start all over again from scratch. The probability for single-step selection to succeed is very small: my own example's probability is of the order 10^(-36) and would take about 10^28 years of independent trials on a supercomputer (eg, capable of one million trials per second) in order to have even odds of succeeding. This is the usual method of selection used by creationists to model evolution even though it obviously has nothing to do with evolution.
In cumulative selection, when the initial randomly assembled trial fails, multiple copies are made of it which are very similar to, yet slightly different from, the original. Then the copy that comes closest to the target is selected and used to generate the next "generation" of copies. And so on. Obviously, this method better models living populations and natural selection. The probability of success is astoundingly better; instead of taking millions of billions of years, it succeeds in less than half a minute -- consistently, repeatedly, without fail.
Since this seemed too good to be true, I undertook a study of the problem which calculated the actual probabilities. In one case, the probability of success within 80 generations is over 99.99%. In other cases, the probabilities of success within 100 generations are still relatively high and increase noticeably with more generations. Obviously, the repeated creationist description of evolution being change through pure random chance is simply not true and very misleading; natural selection can be very deterministic and not at all random.
Instead, I found a quantitative reason behind the statement that natural selection can make the improbable inevitable.
When I worked through the probabilities, what I discovered was that the probability of consistent
failure became vanishingly small. InGodITrust, are you listening?
[*FOOTNOTE: That's half my ancestry talking there, my mother's parents having both emigrated from the Galston area to the US. My apologies if I had inadvertantly caused offense.]
PS
I had stopped to think about it, but better judgement has been put in the back seat. Here are the quotes I posted on my MONKEY page:
quote:
- A. S. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures, 1927:
... If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that
my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on
typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of
their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules
returning to one half of the vessel.
- Douglas Adams. The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy:
"Ford!" [Arthur] said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who
want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."
- Lennon and McCartney:
Everybody's got something to hide, except for me and my monkey!
- RFC 2795: The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)
Abstract
This memo describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite
number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters in
order to determine when they have either produced the entire works of
William Shakespeare or a good television show. The suite includes
communications and control protocols for monkeys and the
organizations that interact with them.
Share and enjoy!
™ Version 4.2