Truly one of the dumber canards offered by scientists to the public is the assertion that given enough time a group of monkeys planted in front of a bunch of keyboards would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare.
Well, a group of researchers at Plymouth University in England decided to check up on this, for artistic reasons more than anything else:
At first, said Phillips, “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.
“Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,” added Phillips, who runs the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.
Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.