Chances of man evolving

Question: How on Earth did we humans beat the towering odds against us ever evolving in the first place? Asked another way, how long would it take a keyboard-equipped monkey to type a sentence by blind chance alone?

Answer: In a new take on the old "infinite monkeys" routine, Clifford Pickover in "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" imagines an indefatigable monkey pounding away, with the target sentence as "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." The phrase contains 56 letters, counting spaces and the period. Assuming a keyboard of 93 potential characters, then the monkey's chance of hitting the first correct character is 1/93, which he must do 56 times in a row: 1/93 to the 56th power (1/93^56). This means the monkey would have to try more than 10^100 times, on average, before hitting on the sentence. "If the monkey pressed one key per second, he'd be typing for well over the current age of the universe."

Luckily, there's a better way: If after every trial, the monkey could somehow save the correct characters and try again only on the misses, mathematical analysis shows he'd need only around 400 trials to have a 50-50 chance of getting the sentence right. And the marvel here is that that's closer to how evolution works, producing remarkable results not by wholesale blind chance but by preserving useful random mutations while eliminating nonadaptive ones.

Question: If competitive "springboard diving" from 3 meters up or "platform diving" from a rigid platform 10 meters above the water (nearly 3 stories!) are too tame for you, have you ever tried "wild diving"? Lots of people have, and a few lived to tell about it.

Answer: In the early days of "wild" diving, lunatics vied to achieve the highest high dive, says Vincent Mallette in "The Science of the Summer Games." At least one leaped 360 feet (110 meters) into the sea from the Graf Hindenburg and lived. In 1918 a Solomon Islander, defying gamblers who bet 10-1 he would die, survived a 205-foot (62-meter) plunge. His suit was ripped off and his body turned black-and-blue for weeks. "But the odds are not good. Of the nearly 700 people who have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge (admittedly not expert divers!), fewer than 2 percent survived the 240-foot (73-meter) drop. Today's competitive dives are never more than 10 meters, and scoring centers around the maneuvers performed during the dive and the grace of the entry."

Question: Most people know that babies yawn, as do neonates within minutes of birth and even fetuses in utero. Boredom of course can trigger yawning, which is socially contagious like laughter. What might people not know?