Evolutionary Scientists Test-Drive Spore, Gripe 252
ahab_2001 writes "The computer game Spore has been marketed partly as an experience that makes evolutionary biology come alive in a game setting. But does that claim hold water? To find out, John Bohannon, a correspondent for Science Magazine (writing as 'The Gonzo Scientist'), sat four card-carrying scientists, ranging from evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge to JPL astrophysicist Miles Smith, down in front of a terminal to play the game. The upshot, says Bohannon: Spore flunks basic science, getting 'most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.'"
In other news (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected.
I never paid much attention to they hype and went mostly by the criterion that I'd even buy Pee [penny-arcade.com] if it's Will Wright's anyway. Also, that it's just a game anyway.
According to TFA, though, it sounds like EA's bulshitters... err... marketers have been shooting their mouth all over the place about how the game is an accurate representation of evolution, and how there's interest from colleges to use it to teach science. And while the former borders on fraud, the latter makes me cringe. As others have said, it's really an ID game, with some evolution language thrown in. The very idea of selling that as accurate science is ridiculous enough, but hyping it as a way to _teach_ evolution... is irresponsible at best.
*Sigh* It's times like these that I see Bill Hicks's point about marketing...
Re:ID (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ID (Score:5, Informative)
In the spirit of fairness, I had a copy of Spore sent to Michael Behe, an intelligent design advocate based at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. After playing Spore, he concluded that it "has nothing to do with real science or real evolution--neither Darwinian nor intelligent design."
Way I understand the point, though... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the way I understand the point, though, it's not that the game _should_ be an accurate represetation of unguided evolution. It's that EA has marketed it as an accurate representation of evolution, and as a way to teach evolution. Clearly that claim doesn't match the game's content.
And normally I'd have said the said you did. But if they made some very clear claims about the game, I think it's fair to judge it by those claims.
I mean, for example, if UT claimed to be (among other things) an accurate flight simulator, it would be entirely fair to expect it to match that claim. After all, that's what their own marketers are telling you to use as your buying criterion.
Way I can tell, that's what they do in TFA. They didn't just come out of nowhere with the idea that a game must be like evolution. (Which would be a silly expectation indeed.) But once EA claimed that it _is_ an accurate representation of evolution, and good enough to be used in colleges, well, the game is on. Let's see how true that statement is.
Re:Evolution or Creation? (Score:3, Informative)
SimLife did a pretty good job on that score. It doesn't have to be completely non-interactive; SimLife allowed you to tweak a huge number of universal variables, but also intervene directly and modify a creature's phenotype or genotype by hand.
The way SimLife implemented it was by allowing creatures to undergo randomized minor mutations when breeding. If a subset of a creature's population got sufficiently different from the rest, it would be designated a new species (assuming there was an open slot for species---it was designed for the 386, I believe, so system resources were limited.)
One particularly memorable game I played ended up with a thriving ecosystem with around 40 different animal species---all derived from a common ancestor without my intervention. Tiny nectivorous fliers; great hulking warm-blooded sea beasts. All the plant life was derived ultimately from either bamboo or kelp.
Of course, it all came crashing down when a forest fire took out the plant-life, causing a cascade failure of the food web.
Spore's failure to do a decent job on evolution is irking to me not least because there's at least one game out there that did it right---and it was made by the same guy.
Re:If you're going to make an insult... (Score:5, Informative)
Please at least try to get informed about who you are insulting. Not everyone who believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value) believes the universe is 6k years old. But even disregarding that, your insult didn't make sense. A game marketed about evolution is popular with people in KS, presumably because you think everyone in KS is a backwards redneck who denies evolution?
I think it would help if you read this [wikipedia.org]
Re:Um, no duh. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually Intelligent Design simply stipulates that the universe was created by an intelligent being (say, God) in some state not equivalent to total chaos and/or guided by that benefactor through its existence to keep things running smoothly.
There are very few intelligent ID proponents in the world (don't stop reading here) who don't believe in what would be called 'micro-evolution' or evolution within a species/genus, but they would happily argue that birds, fish and beasts of the land did not evolve from each other or a common ancestry.
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:2, Informative)
By "you guys" are you referring to participants on this Slashdot discussion, or the marketers of the game? Have you read the news about Spore? Have you heard how it is being presented? The people who are marketing it are trying to say that it *is* based on something scientific, yet it isn't science.
Here's a little nugget [nationalgeographic.com] from the National Geographic channel:
"Journey into the billion-year history of the human body, led by computer game visionary, Will Wright as he explores the break through science that's revealing the secret genetic machinery that shapes all life in the game Spore."
It should be just a "damn game" but it isn't always being presented like that.
Now, of course people should be skeptical of claims such as these, but even people in their right minds may consider that it is based on something scientific when, you know, even people not part of the company are making claims that it is scientific.
There is no "just" an anything. These things matter.
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:3, Informative)
ID is creationism packaged in pseudoscientific terms to make it more appealing to people who don't understand what is happening. The core of Intelligent Design is that things are too complex to have evolved on their own and thus must have been magically created that complex. YOU are talking about Theistic Evolution, which is entirely different from ID. Theistic Evolution is basically says Evolution happened as described, but adds "because God guided it that way". So really Theistic Evolution doesn't attack the science at all, ID does.
Re:Evolution or Creation? (Score:3, Informative)
Latent is the wrong word for Sim Life genes since all organism were haploid. What really happened was that the genetic space was so small, turn frequency being determined by a variable with four or five possible values, that it was pretty likely you'd get whatever turn frequency you'd want in a few generations.
Re:Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected (Score:3, Informative)
There's a difference in literary terms between "hard science fiction" and "soft science fiction". Star Trek falls under the category of "hard science fiction", as does almost everything by Isaac Asimov.
Star Trek hard SF? Really? I wasn't aware hard SF was such a meaningless term. Star Trek may not be quite as far off the space opera end as Star Wars or Lensman, but it's far from hard SF.
It pretends to be, I'll grant you that, but it's all meaningless technobabble.
For hard SF, look at Asimov, indeed. Clarke too, and quite a number of things by Larry Niven and dozens of other authors, but not at Star Trek.