Geneticist Michael Denton has shown that in English meaningful words and sentences are extremely rare among the set of possible combinations of letters of a given length, and they become proportionally rarer as sequence length grows.11 The ratio of meaningful 12-letter words to 12-letter sequences is 1/1014; the ratio of meaningful 100-letter sentences to possible 100-letter strings has been estimated as 1/10100. Denton used these figures in 1985 to explain why random letter substitutions inevitably degrade meaning in English text after only a few changes and why the same thing might be true
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