Spore is about evolution. Or is it?

I bought Spore the day it came out. Played till space stage. It's ultimately boring. The 2 evolution stages are a lot of fun but the game loses depth after that. It's way to easy to conquer the world in tribal and civ stages. Space is little more than making colonies and buying/selling spice for money. The combat system seems like it was added as an afterthought. You can terraform planets, but it's not as cool as it sounds. There's just way too much micromanagement going on. If I'm trying to spread around the galaxy, it's annoying to have to manage riots in cities on various worlds while being at war and trying to stabilize several ecologies by moving the right kind of grass or bush from one place to another. The whole game is just incredibly shallow.

Spore contains Intelligent Design elements? How awful! Let's build a computer game in which the player has no direct influence whatsoever!

Maybe it's because I live in Massachusetts and not Kansas, but I really deplore the fighting back and forth between armchair (and actual) evolutionary biologists with the anti-science rightwing religious groups. While I am on the side of science of course, it annoys me how counterproductive the whole fight has become. The need for evo bio people to fend off ID types in arguments has made the pro-science public less humble, and less accurate too, because we forget how little we actually know about how evolution works, and instead cling to the politically strongest ideas that science generates. In fact, many fundamental problems that need to be solved are being bullied into the margins by the need to make evolutionary theory seem stronger than it really is. In the last 10-15 years The MIT Press has put out several good books delving into the cutting edge of evolutionary theory, among other things exploring the role of complexity in evolution. It may surprise some that "natural selection" is not universally agreed on, as there is a competing paradigm in which the production of forms is the driver of change, and selection is hypothesized to be a filter, having more of a conserving than progressive force on organisms. The problem is that too many scientists outside of biology assume that the neo-Darwinian synthesis popularized by philosophers like Dennett and Dawkins (also fighters in the battle against religion, not coincidentally), is the one and established view, and allow it to shape the interpretation of results in other fields. Perhaps if we were to ignore the creationists instead of fighting them, then we could acknowledge the primitive state of our models and make some real progress.

Wow this guy just destroyed my childhood love of simcity....