Playing God

Luke O'Brien looks at the computer game Spore's Intelligent Design implications:

...the science in the game is wafer thin. Despite some overenthusiastic prognostications in reviews"Spore could be the greatest gaming tool ever created to disseminate Darwinistic ideas," says one criticthe game makes no room for random mutation, the real source of differentiation. And natural selection plays only a minor role. If you don't bless your beast with a mouth or hands, you won't fare well. Almost anything else goes. At one point, my creature's legs and arms were connected by useless and mechanically impossible minilimbs. I did just fine. In Darwin's world, I would have been a snack for a more efficient predator.