Evo

Many people do not realise the formidable power of cumulative random selection. For example, many people reject evolution and think that something like the eye could not have formed spontaneously by itself. This is partially correct, it would be quite astonishing if something complexed formed spontaneously by itself but this isn't actually what happens. For example, take the phrase THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG. Imagine thousands of monkeys bashing away at a keyboard - what are the odds of a monkey typing that exact phrase purely by chance? I worked out that if you include punctuation characters and capital letters, the probability of a random sentence arriving at exactly that text are approximately 1 in 1, 800, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000. The monkeys would be probably typing until the heat death of the universe and would still not have typed it. However, suppose you did the following: start with a completely random sentence of garbage, say PAF QXFJUTS SAJFYQQLADGAZF DBJFBYAQ SDBYASHP. Think of this as the parent sentence. From this sentence, create 10 child sentences, some of which have small mutations, i.e. the occasional letter is slighly different from the parent sentence. Now work out which of the 10 children is the closest to the sentence THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG, no matter how far. This then becomes the next parent sentence from which the next 10 child sentence are produced. Over many iterations, the parent sentence will accumulate gradual improvements until the target sentence is reached.