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Playing God
Now you, too, can Let there be light! Will Wright (maker of The Sims) has created Spore, a game that lets people take on the role of intelligent designer, creating a living organism and guiding it through five stages of evolution: cell phase, creature phase, tribal phase, civilization phase, and space phase.
In Paste Magazine, Wright says, “It’s funny because in the game you’re in the role of an intelligent designer. … Yet the meta-message of the game is that life becomes what it is through the process of evolution.”
Poor Wright is luckless in that it offends the very people Wright allies himself with — atheists. Apparently religious people don’t have a problem with the evolution, but atheists have issues with the way the game portrays religion in the “civilization” stage.
back to top24 Comments to “Playing God”
Sooo….
No quotes from the atheists? What exactly are they critical of?
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So what happens if you start the game and just let it sit there, taking no action? Does the life never evolve? Why would an atheist like that?
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So we’ve established once again that there are some immature, silly atheists who make anonymous comments on the Internet. This will be news when they start calling for censorship, organizing boycotts of EA, or threatening to kill Wright.
I challenge anyone to find a single non-anonymous self-professed atheist who has a problem with this game. That still wouldn’t prove that this kind of nonsense is characteristic of atheists (“militant” or not), but it would be more significant than this non-story.
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Still waiting for atheists to explain homosexuality. A genetic trait that makes you want to mate with the same gender? Not consistent with Darwinian ideas as I understand them.
Cant get over how those poor Mormons in California are being protested by disappointed anti Prop 8 voters.
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The Dawkins and Harris brand of atheist do make one nostalgiac for the late Madelyn Murray Ohair.
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You’ve obviously not looked very hard, then, Sawgunner. There’s an enormous amount of scientific research investigating sexual behavior that isn’t directly reproductive.
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“I challenge anyone to find a single non-anonymous self-professed atheist who has a problem with this game.”
I’ve looked. I don’t see any. I’m pretty skeptical at this point. Just saying there are critical atheists out there doesn’t make it so. At least give us a link to those forums or blogs or whatever venue that has some of these comments. Even anonymous comments….
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Maybe we should ask Hitchens if he likes “Spore”?
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#2 John
LOLOLOLOL
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MiM, I think this somewhat grouchy and not entirely coherent review of the final Harry Potter book is probably the closest we’ll get to knowing Hitchens’s opinion of Spore.
Hitchens is a fan of Pullman, though, so I can’t imagine he’d have any issue with a bit of religion-flavored magic in a video game (that seems to be what the complaints were about).
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Sawgunner,
The gay left is now allowed to throw out the central premise of evolving and mating for the survival of the fittest when it suits them and some others say their lifestyle choices, freely taken and allowed by other less significant man made laws just for them, are unnatural and counter evolutionary
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“Hitchens is a fan of Pullman, though, so I can’t imagine he’d have any issue with a bit of religion-flavored magic in a video game…”
While Pullman seems to be a good writer, I’m sure that Hitchens likes him mainly because of his world view, and his anti-religious screed. I don’t hold fast to my opinion of Pullman’s writing because I don’t read very critically when I’m reading a novel, and because it’s been several years since I read the first one or two…
I’m not convinced that Hitchens would like the game though…
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Llama,
The fact that homosexual behavior doesn’t fit into your simplistic model of Darwinian evolution doesn’t mean that “the gay left” is ignoring science or throwing out “the central premise of evolving,” whatever that means.
Science didn’t stop after Darwin died. You could read about emerging perspectives on the evolution of homosexual behavior here, for example, but of course you probably won’t.
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#13 Pecksniff,
Llamas wrote the book on evolution’s survival of the fittest and will rule the world one day if Obama doesn’t kill us all first.
Darwin didn’t die by the way – he evolved into a llama
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Thanks for the link PeckSniff. I read the entire thing and found it interesting in a perverted sort of way. After I made it past all the text on penises and ejaculation I finally got the real message, which is that because homosexual behavior is evidenced in nature, therefore it must be necessary.
Well, this tautology is completely ridiculous. First of all, there is no homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Animals and animal instincts want gratification and don’t care where it comes from. Gratification knows no bounds. There is no morality among animals. Animals do what animals do. Humans aren’t only instinctual. We can analyze and reason. Humans are not the same as animals.
Animals bite and devour one another. Does that make it a virtue? Animals don’t care whether they eat the young or defraud mothers. If my dog humps my leg, should I make that my own practice?
Even more ridiculous than all of this is the notion that animals “willed” evolutionary traits into existence. I can’t believe academics would peddle such huckum as cogent thought.
But thanks for the link. It was very entertaining in a sad sort of way. It is sad to realize how empty-headed some academics can be.
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Xion,
I’m sure you and I could sit down and find dozens of nature videos on YouTube proving there is, in fact, “homosexuality in the animal kingdom.” Animals have same-sex sexual encounters all the time, and that’s what “homosexual” means in this context, you know. Roughgarden herself notes the obvious fact that animals don’t have sexual identities.
Also, nobody in that article claims that animals are “willing” traits into existence. The argument is that homosexual behavior can have long-term evolutionary benefits for communities and species, if not for individuals. Roughgarden pushes the idea of group selection further than most mainstream evolutionary scientists, but don’t turn her into a strawman.
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Sawgunner at #4: Still waiting for atheists to explain homosexuality. A genetic trait that makes you want to mate with the same gender? Not consistent with Darwinian ideas as I understand them.
Then you don’t understand them.
What’s important for species continuity is that enough individuals reproduce to maintain a viable population. It doesn’t require that everyone reproduce.
Evolution can retain the desire for sexual activity that doesn’t lead to reproduction, like it does many other traits, because while it doesn’t directly contribute to furthering the species, it also does not endanger it.
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Sawgunner at #4: Still waiting for atheists to explain homosexuality. A genetic trait that makes you want to mate with the same gender? Not consistent with Darwinian ideas as I understand them.
There is ancedotal evidence to suggest that open tolerant societies lead to a decline in homosexual population and activity whereas in repressed societies homosexuals, hiding in the general population, tend to reproduce and pass on genetic material. Thus, homosexual population and behaviour tends to go up and down over long periods of time.
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If left to the homosexuals, the human race would have died out centuries ago.
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In regards to the original post, you’re way behind the times, Ms. Harris. Gamer geeks like me have been drooling over Spore for years. It finally came out months ago, and us gamer geeks promptly began screaming bloody murder over its failure to live up to its promises and hype as well as its insulting DRM scheme.
Hey, there’s an idea. Why don’t we talk about Digital Rights Management? That’s a whole lot more relevant to Spore than Creation vs. Intelligent Design vs. Naturalistic Evolution.
I’ll admit though that I did find the idea funny that it was an evolution game played via intelligent design.
Also, Will Wright is indeed to be pitied. Spore sold well, but didn’t live up to the hype or his demigod status among gamers.
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My point in the previous post is that people stopped talking about Spore a month ago.
And that I’d be interested in seeing non-gamers and non-corporate-executives talk about DRM. Do y’all even know what it is yet? It’s the stuff that caused the big lawsuit between Sony and Texas awhile ago when Sony put rootkits on their music CDs.
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This will be news when they start calling for censorship, organizing boycotts of EA, or threatening to kill Wright.
This is funny because that’s been more or less done… but by infuriated PC gamers angry over EA’s DRM rather than evolutionists angry over its depiction of evolution. Well, ok, maybe they haven’t threatened Wright (they seem to make him out as a victim) and they haven’t actually advocated censorship. But they sure are mad at EA!
So what happens if you start the game and just let it sit there, taking no action? Does the life never evolve? Why would an atheist like that?
Nope. You die. Kind of like the real world.
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If left to [Catholic priests/St. Paul/etc.], the human race would have died out centuries ago.
I don’t know a single gay person who wants everyone to share his or her sexual orientation.
Also, “centuries ago” many or most male “homosexuals” also had wives and families, as HRW notes above.
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Outkast gets more ridiculous with each passing day.
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