![]() As noted earlier, Zimmer’s article makes it clear that Spore does not model biological reality. ![]() ![]() Objection 4: Computer simulations demonstrate evolution, thereby refuting design. We don’t have to know who the designer is, or who spawned the designer, to be able to detect design. Objectors to ID often say things like “ID should tell us the designer’s identity,” or, “Who designed the designer?” Browsing on YouTube I can find hundreds if not thousands of Spore creatures that were designed by people whose real names, parents’ names, and tribes of origin I know nothing about. Objection 3: Detecting design requires knowledge about the designer. Hopefully this observation will help some Darwinists to abandon their misapprehension that design is detected based upon the “elegance” or “optimality” of the design, for in reality we detect design based upon the presence of an informational signature know to be uniquely produced by intelligent agents: complex and specified information. Again, Spore’s designs remind us that inefficient or clumsy designs can still in fact be designed. This creature seems a little topheavy for its one leg–not an elegant or efficient design for locomotion. Or consider this creature that seems to be missing some vital organs. For example, this poor catlike creature walks awkwardly on its back and would make a quick lunch for any predator. Not so, if you’re using Spore’s Creature Creator. Darwinists (including Zimmer) love to argue that clumsy or inefficient design necessarily refutes design. Objection 2: Clumsy design refutes design. But so is common design, as Spore’s designs illustrate for us. To be sure, inheritance from a common ancestor is one way to explain many similarities among organisms. In Zimmer’s article, he reports that one biologist who played Spore “stretches the body to give it a neck” and “adds a pair of kangaroolike legs.” But any cursory glance finds Spore’s creature creators regularly re-use bipedal locomotion or long necks in their designs (for some cool examples, see here, here, here, or here). Designers regularly re-use parts that work in different designs. But there are other possible explanations. homology) (except for when such similarities imply convergent evolution). Darwinists commonly take functional similarity as evidence for inheritance from a common ancestor (i.e. Objection 1: Functional similarity implies homology, refuting design. (Update: Spore creator Will Wright now acknowledges in a USA Today article the obvious point that Spore “has aspects of intelligent design.”) Even in his recent September 2 New York Times article, “ Gaming Evolves,” Carl Zimmer reports that “Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology” but admits that “he step-by-step process by which Spore’s creatures change does not have much to do with real evolution.” One biologist was quoted saying, “The mechanism is severely messed up.” And just what is that “severely messed up” mechanism? The answer is obvious: as an article in Time Magazine points out, “You could read Spore equally easily as a model of evolution or of intelligent design, with you in the role of Intelligent Designer.” And given that Spore’s creatures are all intelligently designed, Zimmer’s article unwittingly describes a game that sweeps away many favorite Darwinist objections to ID. I have thus far refrained from blogging about the new video game Spore that is being widely discussed in the media for one reason: anyone can see that Spore is not really about evolution by the Darwinian mechanism it’s about evolution by intelligent design (ID).
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