But when Plymouth University (UK) researchers installed a keyboard and computer screen in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo, it didn’t result in a nicely typed set of the complete works of Shakespeare. Neither did they get a sonnet. Nor even a single word of Shakespeare.
No, when the researchers gave six monkeys one computer for a month, what they got was … a mess.
The first thing the lead male did was to find a stone and start bashing the computer with it. Subsequently, the younger ones came and pressed some of the keys. But most of the macaques’ time was spent sitting or jumping on the computer, or using it as a toilet. (The computer was protected by a transparent plastic covering in such a way that the monkeys could nevertheless hit the keys with their fingers.) After one month, the monkeys had produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter ‘S’. But there was not a single recognizable word in sight. The letter ‘A’ was the only vowel to be used, and it did not make an appearance until page 4.
And, as calculations have shown, even if monkeys could type randomly at a rate of one key-strike per second, without ever stopping, then to get a simple line of intelligible text would take many billions of times longer than the assumed evolutionary age of the universe." CMI
The foolishness of man perverteth his way:
Proverbs 19:3
