That program was an attempt to prove that blind chance can create something in tangile form.

I don't think so. You created that requirement, not someone else, and certainly not Richard Dawkins or the author of that app. You seem to think that evolution does the equivalent of generating random strings and then checking to see if they are somehow meaningful. I assure you, it does not, and any program that did so would be a grossly inaccurate representation thereof. For all your code-reading skills, you seem to have completely missed the point of the applet - that evolution is not a purely random process, nor is it claimed to be by anyone but you.

Call them what you want, they do not represent the evolutionary process, becuase an end result is known. Is the end result known in evolution? No.

No kidding. Didn't I say exactly that in my last post? It's not an attempt to perfectly model biological evolution, it's an analogy intended to illustrate a point that you've managed to miss completely. The point is that biological evolution is not a matter of "blind chance" because it is driven by a fitness function. In this app, the fitness function is represented by the distance from the goal - once again, strings closer to the goal are defined as "more fit" and a preferentially preserved and propagated, just as more fit organisms are more successful at preservation and propagation in the biological world. You're so hung up on what you think it ought to show that you've completely missed what it does show - that the iterative nature of evolution converges on well-adapted organisms, and does so relatively quickly, contrary to claims (such as yours) that evolution cannot produce anything meaningful because it is purely a matter of "blind chance". It is not an entirely random affair - specific selective pressures act to produce specific evolutionary responses.

that evolution is not a purely random process

Anything this is random must also be purely random because there is no such thing as less or more random. For instance: Take a non-random number "A" (your age) multiply it by a random number "B" (try to choose a purely random number, it's hard to do and just as hard to prove) the result, "C", can only be as random, unplanned, haphazard, unpredictable, improbable and meaningless as "B" is.

Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare

Fri May 9,12:39 PM ET

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By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.

Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.

The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.

The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.

Phillips said the results showed that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that.

"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."

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On the Net:

The monkeys' output: www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/

They should have told those anti-evolutionist monkeys to take a shot at: "The Origin of Species"