We often discuss such things as evolution and creation, but I doubt that many pro evolutionists examine closely the actual probabilities of intelligent life spontaneously forming by chance.

Enter the.....

MONKEY SHAKESPEARE SIMULATOR which is unfortunately off line now.. apparently having decided the issue?

The proposition is "Given_enough monkeys,typewriters and enough time, eventually one of them will type a complete_work of William Shakespere.

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1520006
The first post explains how the experiement was carried out.

RESULT.
It was 24 character matches from Henry IV part 2. Certainly higher totals were achieved, but unfortunately, they were not documented.

It took 2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years for them to achieve this record.

I doubt the undocumented 'higher totals' would be much more striking than the documented one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Is worth a read also.

Considering the time/number of monkeys needed to produce just the result mentioned above..and the probability issues being:

<<In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small they can barely be conceived in human terms. Say the text of Hamlet contains 130,000 letters (it is actually more, even stripped of punctuation), then there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10183,946.[4]

Even if the observable universe were filled with monkeys typing for all time, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be less than one in 10183,800. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event…">>

I'd add to this, that if just to produce something rather simple is 'beyond human comprehension'...then the idea of producing something very complex..which has the capability to RE-produce... produces just one reaction in me...

ROFwgwL .. for about a year :) (wgw= With Gut Wrenching)

Please note.. I'm not laughing at those who believe such rubbish..but at the rubbish itself. Those who believe it.. well I'm sure they are sincere...but uninformed......until now :)

Polycarp there is a fatal flaw in your argument. Namely you assume that there is intelligent life anywhere in the universe. We have yet to find any signs of it here on earth so why should there be any elsewhere?

But suppose I let just one monkey type random characters until it's typed the first character of the complete works. Then I keep that character, and set the monkey onto the task of typing the second character. And so on. It will still take a while, but nothing like as much as the experimental result.

If I use lots of monkeys, I can get the required result quite quickly.

So all that I really need is a way of choosing preferred outcomes. Evolution does that by killing off the less desirable outcomes, and keeping the good ones.

The evolution of human level intelligence on Earth may indeed be a low probability event. It appears to have required a number of occasions when our ancestors went through an evolutionary bottleneck that could easily have just wiped them out completely. But since there is human level intelligence on Earth, we know it's not impossible. We might one day discover that we're the only such intelligence in the Galaxy, or even the Universe. But there'd be no one on all those other planets wondering about the lack of intelligence, so nothing much turns on that.

If this is meant to be some sort of back-handed attack on the notion of evolution, it should be noted that processes in nature are not totally random so the argument, while colourful, is basically flawed.

One analogy is that if you periodically delete everything the monkeys type that isn't Hamlet, eventually they would indeed produce Hamlet.

Another problem is that you've started at the singular conclusion of Hamlet and worked backwards when in fact at the beginning there were a vast number of possible outcomes of which Hamlet was only one.

BD, the problem here we have here with you religous types, is
that apart from a few anti evolution websites, based on
your religious views, you refuse to inform yourself about
the mountain of information that is fact is available out
there.

At least learn the basics if you are serious about understanding
what we know. Yes its more then "God did it".

If you are serious about informing yourself, then all credit
to you, otherwise you will argue from ignorance for the rest
of your life.

There is a very readable book that was published by Penguin
in 1990, called "Blueprints"- solving the mystery of evolution.
Its authors are Maitland Edey and Donald Johanson.

If you are really serious about unterstanding just a bit of
the information, go and inform yourself, otherwise you are
peeing in the breeze.

The intelligent design argument was refuted by David Hume over 200 years ago and well before Charles Darwin did his stuff. Any close look at evolutionary theory shows that the odds are stacked against any particular development it is only with hindsight that it looks like a steady, dare i say inevitable, progression. As far the search for intelligent life is concerned it is needle in a haystack type stuff.
People tend to forget that it has been only about 80 years that we have had the technology to send and receive signals. What if contact was made 120 years ago? Chances are that we would have had no idea. Similarly we could be making contact with a planet where the sentient beings are so far advanced that our signals will only be picked up by the odd antiquarian or so early in their advancement that they do not have the capacity to make sense of our signals.