Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did. I always wonder why people choose monke

Thousands of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did. I always wonder why people choose monkeys for that analogy, seeing as we're more or less descended from a recent ancestor. At some point there were only thousands of that ancestor, but they managed to produce something capable of writing Shakespeare within a few million years! Maybe a better animal to choose would be octopi...