If anyone's wondering what to get me for Christmas...

Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare

by Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, Sulawesi Crested Macaques (Macaca Nigra) from Paignton Zoo Environmental Park (UK)

The book is the result of this study, perhaps the best use of science since, I don't know, since that study where they gave that monkey all the cocaine he could eat.

The media summed up the study thusly:

Monkey Theory Proven Wrong

LONDON - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

A group of faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.

At first, said researcher Mike 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 — not quite literature.

The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.

See, I happen to believe that their study is fundamentally flawed. The anecdote says you need infinite monkeys and an infinite amount of time. The learning curve for a monkey is fairly steep. We've had primates in captivity for years, and we still haven't taught them basic secretarial skills. (Then again, perhaps we're not really trying.) I see nothing in their methodology about whether they gave the monkeys a crash course in typing, or, indeed, English. Would you expect a person to speak perfect Esperanto if he had never encountered it before? No. Of course not.

Has anyone bothered asking Elmo, Gum, et al what they were trying to convey? No! Perhaps they were striving for avante garde verse, or perhaps macaques are more accustomed to left-handed keyboards. Or, more likely (in my opinion), perhaps they were merely protesting the defective nature of the experiment. When they type "ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss" and pee on the keyboard, they are really saying, "If you operate from a faulty premise, you get faulty results." Or, more simply, "Garbage in, garbage out."

Plymouth University, I challenge you to rethink your approach, and soon, before unfair monkey prejudices strike yet again, and set monkey rights back another century.

That said, I still want a copy of the book.