Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Today’s Class Project

Barry Arrington
October 30, 2007
Intelligent Design
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Alex Tee Neng Heng and David C. Green think they have demonstrated that the “monkeys typing” hypothesis is true here.  The class is assigned the task of identifying their blunder.

Comments
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems to me that, in addition to what has already been pointed out, if this is to be a valid exercise, each and every phrase from the first to the last should be a meaninglful English sentence or phrase. After all, each and every genome encodes a living, viable phenotype, so likewise each iteration should encode an actual idea or concept or something with actual meaning... If I am blundering, feel free to point it out.C Bass
October 30, 2007
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mike1962 and Chemfarmer, you both got it in one. I think my larger point is that, as Mike points out, it is utterly inexplicable to me that people who are smart enough to put a website up are not smart enough to see such an obvious point. I think the larger lesson here is that people see what they want to see. That applies to "us" as well as to "them," so we must always be on guard against our biases.BarryA
October 30, 2007
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Dembski and Marks actually refer to this arguement in a paper. I whole heartedly agree with mike1962.bork
October 30, 2007
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The error is, of course, that the program knows exactly where it is headed, and is allowed to retain any bits that match the predetermined goal. This experiment has absolutely no relevance to biochemical evolution; does anyone still think it does? Incidentally, in playing with the program I noticed that even a single upper case letter n the target string will result in infinite recursions. Apparently the programmers didn't anticipate that. (the sequence I tested was "Richard Dawkins is an ass")Chemfarmer
October 30, 2007
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The target string is known in advance, and an arbitrary "sticking" rule is imposed on each character slot. This is not how genetic variation and natural selection works. RM+NS is a blind process. No foresight. Dawkins wanted to show how small changes could lead to large scale changes. But Darkin's little game is an example of ID not the blind watchmaker. I stand continually amazed at such malarky.mike1962
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