You say that Bishop Wilberforce published a good review of the “Origin of Species” in the Quarterly Review for July 1860. Has anyone ever republished the book review-on the Internet or elsewhere-or could I find it only in a university library e.g. that of Trinity College Dublin?

God bless your important work.

The certain probability: an infinite amount of monkeys, with infinite amounts of paper, typewriters and time will produce an infinte amount of drivel.

An occasional combination of letters recognized as a “word” may appear; even more rarely, a (very) short “intelligible clause.” But never a collection that, extracted as a whole, would ever be accepted as cognitive thought-even if the source were unknown.

It’s interesting that your correspondent seems blissfully unaware that he is confusing infinity and possibility. Thinking in terms of infinity and probability it becomes clear that the idea of an infinite opportunity does not read over as “all possible outcomes”.

Consider the following: No amount of time will mean that the decimal result of dividing one by three will be anything than a recurring stream of the digit 3 after the decimal point. No one would argue that the rest of the digits from 1 to 9 would appear in that recurring figure!

It is again with interest that I read the comments on this article and wondered what argument will next be presented in defending this illogical fantasy. Blind evolution did not have infinity, to their own admission, to produce eyes (and everything else). The time available is /-20 Billion years. This gives us about 6x10^(17) seconds. If the chance to produce a monkey is 1:10^(1000) (which gives it actually a highly probable chance!) then it means that there must occur at least 10^(983) events per second to give evolution a chance! Wow, we won’t see anything evolving, only perfect end results because it would happen so fast that we won’t even get a chance to see the changes taking place-I hope I am not establishing a new philosophy! Thank you very much for all the precious information and encouragement. Jesus is alive and well!

I’m really surprised anyone bothered writing this piece! Even if the monkeys thing was tight how does that even begin to say anything about the probability of cells forming by chance? We can waste an awful lot of typing arguing against rubbish and not enough just declaring and living simple gospel truth!

One other thing to consider in the “monkeys on typrewriters” analogy is, what language would the desired text have to be in, or could it consist of words in many different languages? Huxley was merely postulating about the possibility of these monkeys reproducing a text that was already in existence, in a language that was already known.

In the case of DNA, the code or “language” would have to exist before the arrangement of “letters” could have any meaning. Indeed, language has to exist before letters can even be conceived. And no language or code can come into being apart from an intelligent mind to give it meaning in the first place.

Further to Jeanne of Australia; Along with the language the typewriter was programmed for it also had to be developed by an intelligence itself. An intelligent (?) person had to round up the monkeys, persuade them to sit for limitless hours and keep typing. Did the the monkeys put in and replace the paper as needed? The further it goes the more ridiculous it gets. Keep up God’s work of pointing out His ways, so far above our human minds.

Aha! But you said there were SIX monkeys. This brings the expected time down to only 1.6 x 10¹⁰¹⁶ years!