It's sad to see the usually-sensible Dennis Prager publish such a misinformed column.

He clearly doesn't understand the theory of evolution. It's not comparable to the million monkeys on the million keyboards, because it's directed by natural selection. Each monkey starts his work de novo, but to make the analogy valid, there would have to be some force that took Shakespeare-like bits and preserved them to be built on by future monkeys.

What were you expecting from Creationists? Sense? Logic? Reason? Wrong crowd.

Apparently, from the article, it was Thomas Huxley who made the original "Monkeys and Typewriters" comment as a defense of Atheism.

When will you people realize that it was all a BLACK MONOLITH? Doesn't anyone watch movies?

Actually, it was a misquote -- he was commenting on the inability of Tork, Nesmith, Dolenz, et al to find work after their show went off the air.

The actual quote was supposed to be something about an infinite number of Monkees auditioning in front of an infinite number of typecasters...

As Rand seems to be saying, the missed analogy is that evolution isn't totally random (like the monkeys pounding on the typewriters), but influenced by external conditions. For the thought experiment to be a valid comparison, there would have to be some force tending the monkeys towards coherence over time. (Say, a text string that equates to a valid word somehow has more survival value than an equally long text string that's just gibberish, and coherent words tend to be remembered, used again and again while nonsense text strings eventually die out, and then words start lumping into phrases as grammar evolves...)

Still, the whole thing with monkeys was just somebody's colorful metaphor for what amounts to a random character generator. Actually trying to do it in practice (as somebody just did) is a cute stunt, but not terribly informative. I seem to remember that Arthur C. Clarke once discussed the typing monkey project in some essay or other, and made the interesting point that the random character generator would eventually type not only the works of Shakespeare but every possible text in English. That would include the science textbooks of the 30th Century -- but just try to find the correct and workable theory for antigravity in the mass of surrounding gibberish (not to mention coherent but erroneous explanations of aerial transportation by demon-power).

But that recent monkey stunt with computers did get me wondering... So I started figuring the odds on producing a single coherent statement (we'll save Hamlet for later). Like "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", which uses every letter in English and so is a common typing class exercise. To keep it simple, I ignored capital letters (capital letters are significant -- as in the difference between "Polish" and "polish" -- but also double character choices from 26 to 52) and punctuation other than a space. So the typing monkey (or random character generator) has 27 possible options to type. And of course position is significant. That means the monkey has a 1 in 27 chance of typing a "t" in the first space. And the odds are multiplied by 27 with each new character position: 1 in 729 of hitting "th," 1 in 19,683 of just getting to "the," 1 in 531,441 of typing "the" plus a space, 1 in over 14 million for "the q"... I gave up by the time I discovered that the odds of typing "the quick" were in the seven trillion range. Given 36 letters and eight spaces in the sentence, the odds of typing the complete sentence correctly, even without capitals or punctuation, are 27 multiplied by itself 44 times.

Now apply this to Hamlet. 52 letters (counting capitals as separate options)+ punctuation marks... I think I might assume 75 options all told here as a rough guess. And how many keystrokes would it take to type the entire manuscript? I can't begin to guess...but still, a very rough ballpark figure might be that the odds are 1 in 75 to the 200,000th...which I assume means either the odds of typing Hamlet right the first time or how many blocks of 200,000 randomly generated characters it would take to find one perfect copy of Hamlet. (And are we insisting on absolute perfection? What happens if one very tired monkey produces an otherwise perfect copy but with eight or nine typos? Does he have to keep typing until he gets it completely right?)

This is beginning to make my head hurt, so I'll stop now...

To the last commenter- Dont stop! You were just getting good! Seriously, Its true that Prager was being unusually idiotic, given that in the real world of evolution we could at least assume some tasty being spit out by the computer when strings of letters of increasing difficulty are being used. However, that still leaves the question of how those first molecules formed randomly into those first bits of reproducible RNA/DNA. I've always heard it compared to the probability of a windstorm rearranging a junk yard full of auto parts into an automobile. Of course, given enough auto parts/molecules and enough wind/ocean currents and enough time, lots of things can happen. Question is- How often does it happen on other planets? Unless, that is, that RNA/DNA actually came from some other planet/comet from way out there as many have suggested. What say you Rand?

We've no idea how often it happens on other planets, and won't until we have a sample size much larger than one.

As to whether or not panspermia explains earthly origins of life, that just moves the problem somewhere else.

I promised myself never to read townhall again. Now i did just to see how bad it was . . . and Prager really really really badly needs a high-school level refresher course in evolution.

but the origin of life question is fun. i read recently that there is some evidence that the necessary elements exist within large asteroids for the formation of amino acids. This appears to be the outer space equivalent of the famous (dammit, i've forgotten the name) experiment where amino acids were created out of the expected elements of early earth, plus electricity. if the hypothesis pans out, we may find that life on other planets shares interesting similarities.

strange: all the solutions.. have to start with a creator doing something.. so something can happen a random?

FDL, we keep identifying more and more amino acids and other organic molecules in dense interstellar molecular clouds... and there are still many portions of the spectrum which show as-yet-uninterpretable peaks, so we have no idea yet what molecules might actually be produced in those future stellar nurseries. But in the low-temperature, UV-shielded conditions within those IMCs, the molecules which form are long-lived and often energetically unlikely... and they are picked up in the comets and other small bodies early on in the condensation process, so there's good reason to suppose they're ubiquitous in an early planetary system.

On top of that, the dust grains in the IMCs, oriented by magnetic fields, might even provide a selective effect due to polarization, making one chiral version of the molecules more prevalent than the other -- so the "left-handedness" of terrestrial life's molecules is even explicable.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if life's beginnings preceeded the Earth's formation by billions of years. A reasonable corrolary is that similar lifeforms might be spread over very large sectors of a galaxy.

I think the experiment you are refering to is the Miller-Urey work in 1956.
FYI, Richard Dawkins has a great explication of the Million Monkeys analogy in his book, The Blind Watchmaker. He even wrote a simple GA program which tests it (on a small scale). He used the phrase "methinks it like a weasel" (also from Hamlet). Try typing that into Google and you will get a lot of quick links to Dawkins work on this subject. He specifically addresses the issue on retaining partial correct versions and allowing the whole work to ratchet upward as oppoased to each monkey starting tabula rasa.
One last point, it is important to remeber that the Million Monkeys argument was meant as a analogy...a much simplified colorful description of a complex process. I notice that creationsists tend to argue (?) with the elements of the analogy, but totally miss the actual science that the analogy was meant to describe. Defeating someone's analogy is at best sophistry, but next to worthless to undermine someone's scientific argument.