Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 07:04:50 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Marx's monkey writer


On Mon, 24 Feb 1997, Gerald Levy wrote:

> Scott McLemee wrote:
> 
> > As I recall, Th.
> > Huxley indicated that they would also type out the Bible and the Magna Carta
> > in the process.
> 
> Not only is this idiotic at face value, but there is a certain
> anti-intellectual insinuation, i.e. anyone, including monkeys, can perform
> intellectual (or religious or political) work.

Not at all.  The argument has nothing to do with Shakespeare, or monkeys 
for that matter.  Whatever else they may be, Hamlet or the Magna Carta 
are strings of letters; their sequence *could* be generated at random, 
given enough time and energy.  

I have been assuming that people knew Thomas Huxley, aside
>from being a scientist in his own right, was the leading 
contemporary popularizer of Darwin's ideas.  He used the 
monkey-and-typewriters image in the course of a *debate* -- i.e. as a 
powerful image intended to refute the theologian's argument that life had 
to be created by God, that it could not have arisen from physical 
processes.  You have to use a little imagination to catch his point, I 
guess, or you take it as "idiotic at face value."  

Suffice it to say that Huxley's rhetorical trope is remembered (if not, evidently, quite 
understood) after more than a century.  Maybe something from the 
debates on Marxism-Thaxis will likewise be remembered a hundred years 
>from now, but that seems only slightly less improbable than my cat typing 
the Grundrisse while I'm not looking.     


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