1 Articles for 'Spore'
- 2007/08/06 Sunday Musings (3)
Note: This post is of highly personal and subjective nature. If you read this blog mostly for informational articles, you can skip this one.
On Saturdays I often spend some time on watching good online videos such as TED Talks.
What was interesting was the video on Spore, a new game from Will Wright (the creator of Sim City and Sims).
Spore is a game about evolution. The gamer can create a simple organism, have the organism go through various environmental events, and watch the originally simple organism evolve into a complex form of life.
The game is supposed to be educational - it's expected to be a more interactive way to teach kids about Darwinian evolutionism.
The problem for me is, I don't believe in evolution.
Well, I do believe the nature has a mechanism in which it often takes the best option out of many options, for purposes like self-healing. For some, this might look like the nature is evolving. But I can't believe the mankind is simply the coincidental result of a series of many random events. I can't believe I'm a coincidence.
The people who say we're the result of a coincidence also say if given enough time, monkeys playing on a typewriter will eventually produce a Shakespear novel. Or if we put all the car parts (seats, pistons, transmission, etc) in a huge chamber, and apply right conditions and give the chamber some nice shakes over a long, long time, then we'll have a shiny new car nicely assembled at the end.
Can you believe this? I personally can't. Why not? Because one thing is missing: The design.
Or the scheme; or the blueprint; or the information; Whatever you call it.
I know this partly because my job is to design new web services. I know that unless I start out with some idea first, nothing whatsoever will come out as a result.
Without design, I don't think a Shakespear novel, a car, or a new web service can come into being, no matter what good conditions we apply and how many millions of years we wait. And we all know that even a simple form of a living organism is probably 10,000 times more complex and delicate than a car or a novel.
If any one of the physical coefficients related to life (k, g, pi, and so on) differ even by 1/100000, there will be no living thing on the earth, then I would bet my chips on the assumption that probably the world was created for humans, not the other way around.
This observation has been one of the foundations for my belief in God and Bible. To which, some of you might say... "What? Bible? That's a concocted old fairy tale... you say you belive it?"
Well, the thing is I've been amazed many times by how accurately the Scripture had predicted the future. For example, Apocalypse 13:16 predicts :
So whoever wrote this passage thousands of years ago saw that in the future, the data on personal identification will be present in the hand and forehead. Wait a minute, the hand is understandable (as there are many fingerprint authentication systems around now), but personal identity lying in... the forehead?
Here's my take on it. Today's most common method of verifying personal identity is to identify one's fingerprint or pupil.
For the "pupil" part, right now the pupil scanners ask you to have your eyes adjacent to the reader; But in the future, as the needs for scanning the pupils of many passing people increase, we might see a big scanner that's put up above the doors etc., asking the passers-by look up and have their pupils scanned. (Remember the movie Minority Report?)
For an ancient man, something like this must have looked like scanning people's ... foreheads, maybe?
Well, some of you might call this too stretched, and even call me unreasonable. But as a Physics major who scored both 800 (full score) on the GMAT and GRE Analytical sections, I think I'm not being too irrational or unanalytical. Believe me, my head is reasonably cool.
So what's my point here? I don't know... I'm not pitching Bible here, at least not on this post. But no matter what, I don't think I'm a mere coincidence, neither are our kids. Which is why I got a bit disturbed by Will Wright's new "educational toy" that will teach millions of kids that their lives are a coincidence.
I'm just sharing my Sunday thoughts - hence the title of the post, Sunday Musings. Back to the Web 2.0 stuff now. :)
On Saturdays I often spend some time on watching good online videos such as TED Talks.
What was interesting was the video on Spore, a new game from Will Wright (the creator of Sim City and Sims).
The game is supposed to be educational - it's expected to be a more interactive way to teach kids about Darwinian evolutionism.
The problem for me is, I don't believe in evolution.
Well, I do believe the nature has a mechanism in which it often takes the best option out of many options, for purposes like self-healing. For some, this might look like the nature is evolving. But I can't believe the mankind is simply the coincidental result of a series of many random events. I can't believe I'm a coincidence.
The people who say we're the result of a coincidence also say if given enough time, monkeys playing on a typewriter will eventually produce a Shakespear novel. Or if we put all the car parts (seats, pistons, transmission, etc) in a huge chamber, and apply right conditions and give the chamber some nice shakes over a long, long time, then we'll have a shiny new car nicely assembled at the end.
Can you believe this? I personally can't. Why not? Because one thing is missing: The design.
Or the scheme; or the blueprint; or the information; Whatever you call it.
I know this partly because my job is to design new web services. I know that unless I start out with some idea first, nothing whatsoever will come out as a result.
Without design, I don't think a Shakespear novel, a car, or a new web service can come into being, no matter what good conditions we apply and how many millions of years we wait. And we all know that even a simple form of a living organism is probably 10,000 times more complex and delicate than a car or a novel.
If any one of the physical coefficients related to life (k, g, pi, and so on) differ even by 1/100000, there will be no living thing on the earth, then I would bet my chips on the assumption that probably the world was created for humans, not the other way around.
This observation has been one of the foundations for my belief in God and Bible. To which, some of you might say... "What? Bible? That's a concocted old fairy tale... you say you belive it?"
Well, the thing is I've been amazed many times by how accurately the Scripture had predicted the future. For example, Apocalypse 13:16 predicts :
And he shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freemen and bondmen, to have a character in their right hand or on their foreheads. (the bolding's mine).
So whoever wrote this passage thousands of years ago saw that in the future, the data on personal identification will be present in the hand and forehead. Wait a minute, the hand is understandable (as there are many fingerprint authentication systems around now), but personal identity lying in... the forehead?
Here's my take on it. Today's most common method of verifying personal identity is to identify one's fingerprint or pupil.
For an ancient man, something like this must have looked like scanning people's ... foreheads, maybe?
Well, some of you might call this too stretched, and even call me unreasonable. But as a Physics major who scored both 800 (full score) on the GMAT and GRE Analytical sections, I think I'm not being too irrational or unanalytical. Believe me, my head is reasonably cool.
So what's my point here? I don't know... I'm not pitching Bible here, at least not on this post. But no matter what, I don't think I'm a mere coincidence, neither are our kids. Which is why I got a bit disturbed by Will Wright's new "educational toy" that will teach millions of kids that their lives are a coincidence.
I'm just sharing my Sunday thoughts - hence the title of the post, Sunday Musings. Back to the Web 2.0 stuff now. :)
