{"id":112,"date":"2008-09-10T20:13:20","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T19:13:20","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-10-26T19:38:06","modified_gmt":"2010-10-26T19:38:06","slug":"spore-evolutionary-propaganda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=112","title":{"rendered":"Spore: Evolutionary Propaganda?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First I laughed, and then I thought &#8220;well good&#8221; when I heard that some Creationalists are complaining about a game that supposedly pushes the theory of evolution down kids throats. See <a href=\"http:\/\/antispore.com\/\">http:\/\/antispore.com<\/a> (don&#8217;t send abuse &#8211; being brainwashed and dumb doesn&#8217;t mean you deserve abuse).<\/p>\n<p>Given that Spore has a human pushing the buttons to control the &#8220;evolution&#8221; 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 &#8220;proper&#8221; evolution would be a little hard to call a game and would probably be so slow as to be pretty boring to watch.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s creation is fact because it was written down in the Bible), but whilst the theory of evolution has not been proved, it <em>does<\/em> fit the available facts.<\/p>\n<p>In fact evolution cannot be proved &#8230; scientific theories are never proved; merely rejected when they cannot predict observations. Currently evolution is a validated theory.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;Oh dear! This knocks evolution on the head; time for something else.&#8221;. 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.<\/p>\n<p>If you think evolution is wrong, you don&#8217;t understand it. Or worse you won&#8217;t accept clear facts because they conflict with your view of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\nFirst I laughed, and then I thought &#8220;well good&#8221; when I heard that some Creationalists are complaining about a game that supposedly pushes the theory of evolution down kids throats. See <a href=\"http:\/\/antispore.com\/\">http:\/\/antispore.com<\/a> (don&#8217;t send abuse &#8211; being brainwashed and dumb doesn&#8217;t mean you deserve abuse).<\/p>\n<p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[594,515,593],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-creationism","tag-evolution","tag-spore","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1O","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1372,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions\/1372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}