Imagine the Quaker
an erstwhile mirror site for weblog on newquaker.com
archives | newquaker.comSunday, May 11, 2003
Who ever said God has no sense of humor? The other day MSNBC reported that research faculty and students in the media program at the UK's Plymouth University put a computer in a monkey enclosure at England's Paignton Zoo and watched to see whether the six Sulawesi crested macaques would eventually get started on creating a Shakespearean play—or, really, whether they would do anything at all. The lead monkey smashed the PC with a stone, they urinated and defecated on the keyboard, but eventually they did get around to putting out 5 pages of text, made up mostly with the letters S, A, J, L, and M. Read about it in their report entitled Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
The notion that monkeys typing at random could eventually produce literature is often attributed to the 19th-century Darwinist Thomas Huxley, who thought that the primates could eventually render the 23rd Psalm. His grandson Julian Huxley put forth a similar but more optimistic argument, with the entire works of Shakespeare as the prize. Neither was very original, since the idea goes back at least as far as Cicero, who (in De Natura Deorum) said:"If anybody believes that this is possible, I do not see why he should not think that if an infinite number of examples of the 21 letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were shaken together and poured out on the ground it would be possible for them to fall so as to spell out, say, the whole text of the Annals of Ennius. In fact I doubt whether chance would permit them to spell out a single verse!"
So what happened between the skeptical Cicero and the arrogant Huxleys? The notion—now an ineradicable dogma in contemporary science, not unlike a perspiration stain on the arm-pit of a clean white shirt—that Chance, coupled with some unique natural laws, could actually create things that we thought only God could do.
This new counter-example teaches us that God can easily use even the smallest intelligence to make a fool of Chance.posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 9:42 PM
If William Bennett the Virtuous Doctor can confess to a bad gambling habit, I guess I can come clean about an ongoing interest in the venturesome blog allaboutjen.com.
Now allaboutjen.com is all about Jen (that's "Jen" as in "Gen-X" so it might not be her real name). She's an ex-sorority girl and ex-successful-executive who was let go from her dream job in October 2001 and now can't seem to get any job at all. The site chronicles her adventures in joblessness, job hunting, the pitfalls of life without the usual purpose of routine, sexism, HR idiots, and trying to pay the usual bills with temporary jobs, and etc.
She's about 35, lives in Chicago, is married to a underemployed guy named Fletch, loves pearls, may need to diet, and has two dogs Maisy and Loki, a pit bull and a black German Shepherd. She's also very funny. At some point you may, like me, harbor the guilty wish that she never get a real job and write for a living instead. But don't tell her that. It's too much fun watching as she learns an important life lesson.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 9:38 PM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
