Grok, Monkeys, Rats Punch Home Elemental Truths We All Know to Be True

Art connoisseurs be on the lookout! Rat paintings for sale!

Seriously.

Joseph Walshe, eighteen-year-old Ella Woodland’s pet rats are producing works of art — and she has currently landed well over $2500 selling the creations online.
Among other items, Woodland’s “studio” for her rodents includes a playpen, mini-canvases, a set of watercolors and a container of bait to lure them across the materials. Scampering through the paint — at Woodland’s encouragement — “their paws create colorful, if abstract, pieces.”

“Sometimes I have to put my finger in a jar of baby food and let them follow it around,” admits the pets’ owner, “so they can walk around the canvas.”

And, reportedly, it hasn’t been for nothing: internet shoppers are snapping up these novelties.

Glancing at them, you’ll see vivid colors, busy, non-traditional patterns, a dash of cutesiness. But one thing you won’t find? Startling portraiture of any kind, not even of the Picasso-esque variety. Neither are luminous landscapes or august urban studies on offer.

No thinking person, mind you, would expect any of those more sophisticated options … remember, this is a gaggle of little furry critters imprinting liquid tints across pieces of fabric. Instinct, common sense and universal experience teach us: works of complexity and exactitude do not emerge — do not ever emerge – under such conditions, i.e., by chance, by accident, by undirected efforts.

For those not connecting the dots: when it comes to generating respectable art, rodents left to themselves ain’t gonna get it done. You can bet their consistent end result would be a smeary, streaky, spattery mess … at best. It’s why Ms. Woodland has to goad her furry friends into action, to lead them along using food goodies. She’s aiming for items she can peddle on the cyber-market. She wants to earn a profit. In that regard, completely unsupervised rats will only disappoint.

Admittedly, Woodland’s contribution to the process is rather behind-the-scenes; but it’s essential nonetheless. Never mind, by the way, her purchasing of the actual art supplies, her arranging of them near the critters, etc. She has to provide all the materials, place them in the proper setting, even supply a touch of guidance for the beasties if anything even mildly marketable is to result. Without Woodland’s indirect involvement? Even the comparatively modest compositions she’s hawking wouldn’t become available.

The whole enterprise calls to mind the oft-cited infinity monkey theory”. This thought-experiment posits that “if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

That conclusion, of course, is silly. Even preposterous. And for those who need that verdict to be corroborated: BBC News, Sydney’s Hannah Ritchie reports:

“[A] new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.”

Whether a single hard-working primate or “every chimp in the world” battering away at a typewriter “until the end of the universe”,

“they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works. … ‘It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,’ the study says.”

Authentic “works of art” worthy of the label, coherent examples of prose — anything orderly, intelligible, intricately functional — require purposeful creation. They never simply stumble into existence. A familiar term which also could be employed here is “design” … that is, these phenomena come into being courtesy of some level of design. It follows that a conspicuously designed artifact or product only comes into being when it is designed and produced by a designer/producer.

In every other sphere or feature of life — every one — this intuition is a given. Across the globe today, in whatever culture or society — and thousands of years ago as well — the average, sensible person would respond to the above assertion with a “No, duhhhh…” (or whatever the equivalent of that phrase would be in their native language.)

Tools and devices. Structures of even the vaguest intricacy. Furniture. Creative works of any stripe … All are the result of an individual’s or group’s intentionally applying their ideas and plans to contrive something. It’s an ineluctable, on-the-ground truism.

Except, that is, where the nearly endorsed topic of Darwinian evolution is concerned. Then, suddenly … the universe appeared out of nothing, by chance! Life on earth emerged as a result of glorious happenstance! Creeping blindly but implacably forward over mind-numbing spans of time, that life prospered! Improved! Matured! Until … voilà! Modern man and his modern accomplishments nearly magically showed up!

Philosophical materialism, which denies the reality of any god, any spirit world, any transcendent realm, and which is, functionally, the regnant ideology of the twenty-first century, must have it so. There cannot be a Creator or external Force responsible for everything around us; or any “Intelligent Design” at the back of our dizzyingly remarkable and seemingly designed cosmos. All of nature and humanity? They simply must be a fortuitous accident.

Everyone recognizes a colony of domesticated rats can’t manufacture desirable artwork without at least some external help. But the universe? We’re blithely instructed that fourteen-billion years ago it banged out of the blank empty void of nothingness, utterly adventitiously. Ta- daaa!

The claim is plainly hogwash. And, believe it or not, guess who agrees? When pressed on the matter even Grok ruled undirected evolution unachievable.

In his new video series “A Talk With Grok”, Christian apologist Calvin Smith set parameters to strip away ideologically driven responses, then asked the AI chatbot to apply “only strict logic, mathematical probability, and observational science” in addressing the feasibility of Darwin’s theory. Its pronouncement?: Evolution is “effectively impossible”.

But GROK doesn’t stop there, asserting “that intentional creation of life by God is the most probable, adding that those who reject intelligent design are ‘denying overwhelming evidence. … The most logical conclusion based on strict logic, mathematical probability, and observational science is a directed process implying a purposeful, intelligent design'”.

So, 1000 points here to those willing to tip their hats to the obvious. We’re being reminded of truths that click with early everyone — if only deep down, subconsciously and silently. That said, it’s pathetic the “experts” require refutation from, and regular, commonsensical folks need to be buttressed by, Grok … and monkeys … and rats.