Does anyone else in this forrum belive in inteligent design theory?
If you do belive it, (or even if you don’t,) Should it potentially be represented in Thrive?
If so, what do you think the the best way to go about doing that?
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Personally, I believe in the theory, but don’t necessarily think it needs to be represented in game. (beyond a meta perspective that the game designers and players using the editors are the intelligent designers within the context of the fictional setting.)
Thrive is a game about evolution.
Intelligent design is the opposite of evolution.
I don’t think I need to say anything more.
Fair enough. I don’t care to get into a debate as to where each theory may be right or wrong, like I did last time.
at least not here, as witch theory is correct has no bearing as to what would make for a more interesting game.
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P.S. what set me off about that the last time, was the implied idea that any theory other than evolution was “biased,” witch is in and of itself is biased, in my opinion.
You can tell my opinion by the fact that I moved this out of #science but I’ll elaborate a bit.
But first off let me recount an interesting remark by @tjwhale.
Who said that in thrive the player species is being intelligently designed by the player whereas the AI species follow evolution / natural selection (albeit slightly simplified in order to reduce the amount of computing power the game needs).
Isn’t that neat?
Now to my “opinion” about intelligent design in the real world. First off, it’s not really even a theory: it has no predictive power and there is no way to out it to the test. So that basically disqualifies it from even being a theory and being useful to think about. It’s basically just an extension of saying that there is some mysterious stuff going on, as an alternative to an actually working, testable theory, that makes useful predictions possible.
Edit: I hope I don’t upset anyone too badly with this post.
One more thing I’d like to say is that there are parallels to string theory here. Basically the case with string theory is that the it makes no predictions we can test, also any physical phenomena we have observed can be modeled with other theories as well, so string theory is providing an alternative, more complex, reason for things being the way there are. Similarly I think that saying that an intelligent designer is behind the variety of life we see around us, is similarly useless as our observations and theories about evolution explain everything. So intelligent design is trying to provide an alternative, more complex, explanation for things that are already understood without it. In my opinion this leaves no room for intelligent design to be useful ““theory””.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Intelligent Design has been a thing before theories like Evolution and the Big Bang were. Also, both religion and atheism have explanations for how the universe and life came to be, so both provide equal use to people.
I do like how you manage to not say that “Oh yeah, Religion is false.” and instead say that Intelligent Design isn’t really a theory at all.
Wikipedia says that intelligent design was invented in 1989. Evolutionary theory was very well established by then.
Depending on how you count, I’d say quite modern understanding of evolution started in the late 1800s:
I try. Wikipedia is much more brutal: " Intelligent design ( ID ) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins”.[1][2][3][4][5]"
The Ascension stage, as the player becomes godlike due to an incredibly high tech level, would be an avenue to partially represent intelligent design in the game.
I say partially because Ascension stage is still based on science fiction tropes that wouldn’t be out of place in say, Stargate or Doctor Who. Life-seeding would be an example of these tropes.
The second part is that the player has a vastly different attention span than the Abrahamic God (who exists outside of time), and is not expected to create entire ecosystems from scratch. If you’re like @GROMALOCARIS and have built your own planet over the course of nearly a decade, there’s no stopping you from building that in-game.
But regular players will probably only make about three creatures to seed on a planet, and watch as they survive and adapt to their environment in a Darwinistic sense. I’d see that as more of a coliseum match than intelligent design.