Sep 102008
 

First I laughed, and then I thought “well good” when I heard that some Creationalists are complaining about a game that supposedly pushes the theory of evolution down kids throats. See http://antispore.com (don’t send abuse – being brainwashed and dumb doesn’t mean you deserve abuse).

Given that Spore has a human pushing the buttons to control the “evolution” of creatures in Spores, it seems somewhat imaginative to claim that it represents evolution. But perhaps it is close enough after all a simulation of “proper” evolution would be a little hard to call a game and would probably be so slow as to be pretty boring to watch.

Even if it does work as propaganda for the theory of evolution, it is pushing a theory that is accepted by every serious biological scientist out there. Creationlists like to claim that evolution is just a theory (and God’s creation is fact because it was written down in the Bible), but whilst the theory of evolution has not been proved, it does fit the available facts.

In fact evolution cannot be proved … scientific theories are never proved; merely rejected when they cannot predict observations. Currently evolution is a validated theory.

Evolution has lasted for almost 150 years which is an astonishingly long time for a scientific theory to last. It has of course changed in that time through minor improvements, but nobody has discovered something and gone “Oh dear! This knocks evolution on the head; time for something else.”. If you think of the changes in our understanding of the biological world since 1859, the fact that evolution is still accepted (by scientists) is quite remarkable.

If you think evolution is wrong, you don’t understand it. Or worse you won’t accept clear facts because they conflict with your view of the world.