Some pro-I.D. groups have already targeted Spore as a possible educational vehicle. “It raises a lot of the questions we’ve been thinking about,” Casey Luskin of the Intelligent Design Evolution and Awareness Center told me three months ago. “It has interesting pro-I.D. implications. … I know of at least two video-game developers affiliated with this who are pro-I.D.” Luskin wouldn’t tell me who those developers were, but he did recently weigh in on the Discovery Institute’s blog to list five reasons why Spore will destroy common objections to intelligent design. His conclusion: “Spore is a video game that is intelligently designed to allow users to create fantasy worlds where evolution really can take place.” (If a game that lets you play god is intelligently designed, does that make Will Wright some kind of deity? Could he be Auðumbla, the icy cow of Norse legend that spawned the first gods by licking hoar frost?)
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The problem is that those nuts are right: the game isn’t about evolution at all. There’s not a sight of natural selection at work or of random mutations. You, their god, decide exactly how they are going to evolve, even if it’s not suited to their environment.