What are the odds of a monkey typing one predetermined nine-letter word, such as "evolution"? We'll give Huxley a break, and assume a typewriter with only letters, no other symbols. Obviously, the first letter, "e", would be a piece of cake. But to get "evolution", since the alphabet has 26 letters, one must multiply 26 by itself eight times. We find the monkey would need, on average, more than five trillion attempts just to write "evolution" once correctly. Typing ten letters per minute, this would take over a million years. To get two consecutive predetermined nine-letter words-such as "evolution commenced"-would take more than a billion billion years, taking us much further back than the Big Bang, which supposedly occurred some 15 billion years ago.

James Perloff in The Case Against Darwin