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To: general_re
Dawkins is a clever atheist, but that is all.

This program models his suggestion that, were a monkey allowed to type random letters, he would produce a work of Shakespeare very quickly if letters he happened to type in the right places were preserved with each attempt.

"Very quickly"? Highly doubtful.

Who or what intelligence determines the "right places" and who or what intelligence does the preserving?

Dawkins is a clever atheist ideologue, nothing more, and he has risen to prominence because he is an atheist, not because he has anything useful to say about Evolution. He is making an effective argument here for Intelligent Design.

33 posted on 03/06/2002 6:06:42 AM PST by Phaedrus
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To: Phaedrus
"Very quickly"? Highly doubtful.

Not really - empirically verifiable. Here's a Java version of Dawkins's simulation, slightly modified. Stick in a phrase, see how long it takes to generate it by cumulative evolution.

Who or what intelligence determines the "right places" and who or what intelligence does the preserving?

The shortcomings of the analogy are not the shortcomings of evolution - evolution is not goal-driven (teleological), as the Shakespeare example is. However, if you understand that Dawkins is trying to illustrate how adaptive traits are passed on, rather than scrapped - as this article would have us believe - then the analogy is still a useful illustration.

38 posted on 03/06/2002 6:27:51 AM PST by general_re
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To: Phaedrus
I get around 400 generations, assuming that there are 46 characters used by Shakespeare and that there are 157,175 characters in Hamlet.
44 posted on 03/06/2002 6:41:38 AM PST by Physicist
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