The Infinite Monkey God?
During high school, I worked as a busboy at a fairly posh restaurant. Our manager was an effective but uptight fellow who had little appreciation for jokes. One day, bored during setup, a friend and I decided to get under the manager’s skin a bit. We took the tray of sugar packets — there were four varieties — and stacked them neatly at the door to the dining hall in four piles, sorted by type. The crew assembled for our pre-shift meeting, and our manager charged down the hall and through the main dining room door. He instantly noticed the packet arrangement, and asked in consternation, “Who did this!?!”
I remember being struck by the fact that he instantly assumed that someone had made the arrangement. The dining room door was right next to the coffee stand, and it would have been entirely possible for some packets to have accidentally fallen. The presence of an ordered series immediately alerted him to the presence of intelligent agency.
It was a goofy, inconsequential moment, but it always comes to mind when the subject of evolution and its engine of natural selection arises. The theory relies heavily on chance, but as this incident shows, we easily recognize chance outcomes versus results of intention/creativity — ‘Sugar packets don’t just fall that way’. Or, to quote the pirates in Treasure Island when they come across Captain Flint’s skeletal pointer, ‘What sort of way is that for bones to lie?’
I am far from an expert on biology or evolution, so I must approach the topic from an intuitive standpoint. This is my starting intuition: that humans recognize intention when they see it.
When one begins to confront arguments in favor of evolution via natural selection, the basic formula proposed goes as follows: chance mutations + natural selection + massive amounts of time = evolution. This sounds all well and good. Push a little further, and you will notice a heavy reliance on the ‘massive amounts of time’ variable. The age of the universe is estimated at over 13 billion years, which is mind-boggling. So mind-boggling, in fact, that one reflexively assumes that it must be sufficient time for this adaptive process to have occurred. But is it truly adequate?
There is a famous thought experiment intended to illustrate the relation of chance and time: the infinite monkey theorem. We are first asked to imagine a number of monkeys banging on typewriters. The thought is that, given a vast enough quantity of time, the apes’ indiscriminate hammering would eventually produce any text, i.e., a draft of Hamlet. However, when calculating the probability behind this claim, the result comes out to a potential success after a billion billion years. There are not a billion billion years known to have occurred in this particular universe — there are only thirteen. Therefore, there has been insufficient time to produce Hamlet, let alone the collected works of the bard.
Applied to the development of life, scientist Fred Hoyle hypothesizes that the time necessary for the chance production of a functional protein is equal to the time required for a blindfolded person to solve a Rubik’s cube proceeding at a rate of one turn per second. By this calculation, pure chance would require an interval more than 300 times greater than the age of the earth to produce a protein. Time may be the X factor when attributing evolutionary development to chance, but 13 billion years is far too small a quantity to make the math work. Consider further that we are considering the origins of life on the planet Earth, which clocks in at only 4.5 billion years of existence. In reality, therefore, we have far less time to work with than the age of the universe itself.
Bracketing the time variable for the moment, we are left with the other two elements of our evolutionary equation: chance mutations and natural selection. Time is the background condition for the interaction of these two components. The sum of chance mutations and natural selection is intended to explain the facts of change and progress.
If evolution proceeds by this gradual, chance route, one expects to find an enormous amount of “half-eyes” and “quarter-wings” marking the passage between forms in response to environmental pressures. Famously, there is very little evidence to be found in the fossil record of so-called “transitional stages”. Instead, we note many instances of vast leaps forward, creating the well-known “gaps” in the fossil record. Wings simply appear as functional wings. They adapt and change in response to the environment, but remain largely operational.
Why is this the case? I would argue that a half-wing or a partial eye is not beneficial to the organism. A working arm has vastly greater utility than a half-wing that can neither fly, nor be used for grasping and fighting. A half-wing is a severe disadvantage. Chance mutations are nearly always lethal rather than helpful. An organism’s genetics are somehow predisposed to produce the optimum arrangement of limbs, organs, and brain chemistry. A deviation from this arrangement will almost never be useful.
Additionally, the appearance of a functional wing would not, in fact, be a single mutation, but thousands of random mutations occurring simultaneously in one organism on the micro-level. The odds of so many deviations transpiring concurrently is unfathomably small.
Furthermore, one must factor in the necessity of mating in order to pass on this useful trait. Not only must thousands of helpful chance mutations occur in a single organism, but they must also occur simultaneously in an organism of the opposite sex. The pair must then find each other and successfully reproduce. The chances of this occurring seem less than microscopic. We cannot even rely on time in this instance, because the mating window for any form of animal life is the blink of an eye relative to the vast quantities of time cited by evolutionary scientists. Therefore, it is hard to swallow random mutations as a source of useful novelty.
It is quite true, however, that natural selection does select for advantageous changes which increase an organism’s likelihood of survival within their environment. We observe the principle of natural selection at work everywhere, and its effect is undeniable. The problem, as I see it, is that natural selection chooses mutations that have already occurred, for reasons unknown. We saw above that chance is exceedingly unlikely to produce useful mutations, and yet drastic changes are observed to occur and afterward to be selected. This only explains why they are chosen: environmental advantage. It does not clarify how they come about in the first place.
Geneticists admit that the potential benefits of a particular mutation do not increase the odds of that mutation occurring, nor can positive environmental feedback be passed back into the organism’s DNA. Dr. Laurence Loewe remarks, in the journal Nature, ‘to the best of our knowledge, the consequences of a mutation have no influence whatsoever on the probability that this mutation will or will not occur. In other words, mutations occur randomly with respect to whether or not their effects are useful.
Thus, beneficial DNA changes do not happen more often simply because an organism could benefit from them. Moreover, even if an organism has acquired a beneficial mutation during its lifetime, the corresponding information will not flow back into the DNA in the organism’s germline. This is a fundamental insight that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck got wrong and Charles Darwin got right.’
So, we are left with the conundrum of how countless beneficial mutational leaps occur which are then naturally selected, when we are told that the potential utility of various mutations cannot be factored in ahead of time. Chance cannot consider the past in relation to the present and provide a creative solution, yet this is what appears to take place time and again.
What if the geneticists are mistaken in their conviction that possible advantages are not somehow factored in? Just as an organism in its conscious actions proceeds by instinct, perhaps genetics reacts in the same manner? As in the case of my former boss recognizing the intentional ordering of the sugar packets, it seems that we intuitively grasp intentionality in nature.
There appears to be some sort of creative urge within the biological world that assesses the environment and proceeds, by means of great leaps, toward a new and better-suited organism. These must also occur at once in many organisms so that the mating dilemma is solved. The creationists respond with variations on the “God-of-the-gaps” theory, namely that any time a leap is observed is a moment when God stepped in and pushed the organism to the next level. This seems to be grasping at straws.
But there are gaps! Nature does not appear to randomly stumble forward by trial and error, but to assess the situation, take inventory of the past, and creatively leap to the next stage. Just as an organism’s instincts respond to the appropriate situation when it appears, perhaps there are evolutionary instincts latent within the biosphere that are triggered by the appropriate biological stimuli.
This implies a sort of intelligence, which the scientists refuse to acknowledge, for fear of handing the creationists a club to beat them with. Given our predisposition to recognize intelligence when we see it, however, the creationists have a point: nature produces intelligent solutions to environmental problems, and we recognize this intentionality.
This indicates less than many think, however. The creationists may see this inborn drive toward greater complexity as evidence that God Himself is directing the process of evolution. Perhaps He is, but the mere presence of this creative drive does not necessarily indicate the truth of any particular mythology and moral code; this is what they truly wish to establish. This is the primary error creationists commit. Evidence for orderly and teleological progression within nature is not evidence that Christianity, nor any other religion, is true.
Equally for the scientists, there is a wish to deny this creative urge within nature because they have tacitly conceded to the creationists that to acknowledge the presence of order within nature would grant creationists the license to impose their particular mythology upon the wider realms of human life.
This tension is what I believe leads to a looking-the-other-way in regard to biology’s inventive drives. Both sides observe the order, as all humans are adept at immediately spotting order and intention, but they either wish to do too much or too little with this observation. If we could observe this fact impassively, without a wish to harness it in order to control others, perhaps it would become clear where the world has come from, and where it is going. Perhaps we must simply listen to nature. If we listened, I think we would be more likely to hear the primordial song than the distant rumble of typewriters.
