Word Monkeys

To write commercially, one must pay one’s dues. It took me literally decades to make a successful go of this. Writing is much like a muscle. It gets better the more you use it.

Writing freelance offers a great deal of flexibility but very little stability. Whenever I gripe about being too busy, my bride helpfully observes that I could find myself unemployed with an email. She’s always quick to put my problems in perspective.

My Dad once cautioned me that you never get promoted to positions of less responsibility and less frustration. While he has been very successful himself, he suggested I approach proffered promotions with a certain modicum of skepticism. The reason you get paid more is most typically because somebody wants you to work harder, longer and faster.

As a result, on the couple of occasions I had been offered an editorship someplace, I have politely declined. As it is, I write on my own schedule because it’s fun. My editors are my friends. Their jobs sound hard. I think if I were chained to a production calendar, this would start to seem like work in short order.

All this is a very roundabout way of introducing my own informal moniker. I don’t know anything about page layouts, print runs or marketing. That’s editor stuff. Me, I’m just the word monkey.

Real Word Monkeys

You’ve all heard the supposition. If a whole pile of monkeys banged away randomly on typewriters long enough, eventually one of them would create the works of Shakespeare. Scientists call this the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

The reason it matters is that nowadays, we modern humans place a great deal of faith in the inimitable power of random. Secular science tells us that it was actually this indomitable engine that ultimately spawned all life on Earth. In a nutshell, you take a few precursor amino acids, put them someplace warm and moist, and let Nature do its thing. A zillion years later, you open up the oven to find Margot Robbie. Personally, I don’t buy it.

Details

A pair of Australian mathematicians named Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta recently put some numbers to that theory. The results were fascinating. While esoterically entertaining, they also bear on deeper stuff as well.

The global population of chimpanzees currently stands at around 200,000 animals. Chimps live about 35 years in captivity. If every chimp on the planet started typing randomly on a typewriter at a rate of one key per second, the chances that one monkey might accidentally construct a single coherent five-word sentence during their natural lifetime is one in 10 million billion billion. There is only a 5% chance that a single chimp might successfully produce the word “bananas” during that same lifetime.

Even if you increase the number of participating monkeys astronomically and profoundly accelerate their stenography, you’re still not going to craft any meaningful literature before the universe contracts into a cold lump of inert matter. Not even some vapid Guncrank column. Certainly not one of the Bard’s magnificent sonnets.

Who Cares?

So, why does that matter? I would opine that the Infinite Monkey Theorem pokes at the heart of some deeply flawed assumptions. Dig far enough and you might just uncover unexpected insights into life, existence and the universe.

The human brain weighs about three pounds. It is mostly fat. Fat is mostly water. Fresh brain is shockingly insubstantial. If you pick one up, it tends to kind of sag between your fingers. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Despite that diaphanous lack of substance, this remarkable contrivance nonetheless contains some 86 billion neurons that are served by a whopping 400 miles’ worth of dedicated blood vessels. Those 86 billion neurons form more than 60 trillion discrete connections. Taken in aggregate, this is what determines that my favorite color is blue, that my ideal classic submachine gun is the Beretta 38A, and that I would give my very life for my wife and children. There is not a human being on the planet who can accurately explain the mechanics behind why that is.

Source Code

Deoxyribonucleic acid is the computer code for all known life. The characteristic double helix architecture was first described by James Watson and Francis Crick back in 1953. DNA is comprised of four nucleotides that combine in an essentially infinite number of combinations to encode everything about who and what we are. That same common source code drives single-celled bacteria, African elephants, eastern grey squirrels, manatees and Donald Trump.

If you were to unwind the DNA in a single human cell, it would be about six feet long. If you were to do that to all of the cells in a single human child and then hook that stuff end-to-end, it would stretch from the Earth to the sun and back 400 times. The intrinsic complexity is legitimately beyond our capacity to grasp.

And that’s the point. Secular science tells us all that is just random. Put some carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in a crock pot for a few billion years and out pops Arnold Schwarzenegger. I refuse to accept that. I’m pretty sure all those monkeys agree with me.

Deep Magic

I am an unapologetic evangelical Christian. I wear Jesus on my sleeve. I simply cannot believe that we arose de novo from the primordial ooze due to random natural forces. Like all those industrious monkeys, there’s just not enough time in the history of the universe to pull that off.

I am rather convinced that we were actually created. In fact, I believe we are both fearfully and wonderfully made. I would assert that the empirical evidence supports this. That observation shapes everything about the way I perceive the world.

I don’t see the ubiquity of DNA as evidence of a common random progenitor. I see DNA as evidence of a common engineer. If I were tasked with designing all known life, the first thing I would do is bodge up a universal computer code. That’s just solid engineering practice.

There was a time when most everybody believed in God. Tragically, that is no longer the case. However, we are all hardwired to worship something. For some, that is money. For others, that is Mother Earth. Many modern folks honestly worship themselves. Personally, I choose the God of the Bible.

You pay your money, and you take your chances. However, be sober in your decisions, my friends. You don’t want to get this one wrong. There’s a great deal riding on it.

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