Tag: evolution

TBT: SimEarth

The Portly Politico4 Comments

I’ve been on a video game kick lately, diving back into the Civilization games and listening to a lot of the Gaming Historian on YouTube.  As such, it seemed like a good time to look back at another video game post, one about the planet simulator SimEarth.

SimEarth was one of those games that I found instantly appealing—a massive simulator of an entire planet, going through all its geological, biological, and civilizational phases.  Even growing up in a household that rejected the theory of Darwinian evolution (a theory I still don’t accept, although I acknowledge that adaptation and mutation are both possible and happen frequently), the prevailing scientific understanding of our world made for a fun video game.

The possibilities were endless.  Want to be a Deistic god and let the world run on its own?  Go for it.  Want to interfere frequently in your planet’s development?  Do it!  Want to make starfish or Venus fly traps sentient beings capable of forging an advanced civilization?  Why not!

I used to be able to make pretty compelling planets in this game, with rich histories and multiple species in succession rising to sentience, before heading off an intergalactic journey of the stars.  Apparently, I lost any skills I had, as my last game a couple of years ago (detailed below) ended in nuclear winter.  Oops.

With that, here is 27 May 2020’s “SimEarth“:

Read More »

Why (Online) Scientists are Annoying

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Today’s post won’t exactly reach the commanding heights of culture, but, hey, I wrote nearly a thousand words about a dweeb’s belt yesterday, so let’s keep the low expectations a-rollin’.

Readers know that I’ve been on a bit of a Quora kick lately (see here and here). Quora allows users to submit questions, and for pretty much anyone to provide answers. I can’t remember how I got signed up for it, but I get a daily digest pertaining to areas in which I have expressed an interest.

Usually I get strange questions related to evolution. The first response is always a snarky atheist attacking the questioner’s underlying premise or motives. “Uh, well, actually, there is no evidence against evolution, because we can just shoe-horn every inconsistency into this amorphous, nineteenth-century theory based on the localized observations of one zoologist on a self-contained island ecosystem.”

Those don’t bother me too much, because I just assume anyone who believes in evolution loudly online is an Internet atheist that hates God because his parents got divorced. What bugs me the most are the armchair astronomers.

Read More »

Gelernter Gives up Darwinism

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Yale Computer Science professor and—as I found out today—Trump supporter David Gelernter has given up on Darwinism, finding it to be a “beautiful” but flawed theory.  Gelernter acknowledges that species make small adjustments based on their environment, etc.—adaptation—and that Darwin was correct in that regard, but that the process of new species developing from existing ones is mathematically impossible, even if the universe is trillions of years old.

For conservative Christians, skepticism of Darwin’s theory of evolution is something you keep quietly to yourself, lest you’re mocked roundly, or that you militantly espouse, which tends to turn people away—they tune out.  Regardless, the world at large has bought into Darwinism completely, even with holes in the theory (like the lack of a plethora of pre-Crambrian fossils that should, according to Darwin’s theory that all life descended from a common ancestor, be present given the Cambrian Explosion).

Read More »