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With all the debates on the teaching of creationism, evolution, and intelligent design this year, it’s good to know that some people take a more humorous approach to natural selection. Darwinian poetry is a project which asks a daring question – can the input of users cause inherently bad poetry to evolve into something better? By applying their own method of natural selection, the project hopes to create one of the most impossible aspects of any language – a good poem.
From the site:
“Starting with a whole bunch (specifically 1,200) randomly generated groups of words (our “poems”), we are going to subject them to a form of natural selection, killing off the “bad” ones and breeding the “good” ones with each other. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge.”
The natural selection process occurs when a random peruser of the site picks one of two poems. Users are invited to vote on poem preferences in order to help the progression of poem society. Eventually the bad poems die off, while new poems are created when the good ones… well… I’ll tell you when you’re older.
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Yikes. That is some bad poetry.
But alas
I am one that poetry
ongoing and boring
irritates me.
HAHAHA. This is great… I can’t wait to see the poems this thing produces.
I wonder if some Christians will pop-up and take the good poems and say that God created them instead.
I wonder if some Christians will pop-up and take the good poems and say that God created them instead.”
I know I won’t.
Oh my.
I will say that some of the later generations of poems were looking much more interesting that generation 1.
I’ll have to stop back in another dozen generations and check again.
This is the first time I’ve read this article. Interesting. The poems do sart out horrific, but I just happened to glance over one of the new evolution ones, and it wasn’t that bad. Of course I am not a poetry critic.
On another note. Too bad some people do not realize what the conflict was between Darwin(ism) and The Opposer(s). Just for the record, Darwin never ever said he believed we came from monkeys, apes, or any of the such. Just as the link suggests, it is all about survival of the species through addaptation. This time it happens to be poems. Out with the old, in with the new.
You forgot one critical aspect of natural selection. SUCCESS! What happens when you finally reach a perfectly successful poem species that overshoots it’s ecological equilibrium, but still manages to thrive?
It consumes all other forms of writing; it runs out of interested readers and eventually starts inbreeding with itself. Genetic mutation rate spikes and self-selection occurs. The poem is retold and retold until it becomes distorted from the original, like the telephone game. Many distorted versions emerge, eventually spreading poetic putrification throughout the entire species. The original species, though still in-tact as a species, begins to develop iambic pentameter problems, improper use of homonyms, etc. The disinterested, now non-existant predator readers’ absense means that the poem species will de-evolve into many unstable versions, and only similar variations will re-join and attempt reproducing to create a new poem species. This sparks the attention of old readers and creates new ones, which spurrs on the predator-prey relationship once again, and new species begin to “improve” (become resistant to obsolescence through the natural selection filter).
When something ‘natural’ is observed, quantified and somewhat understood by man, it automatically means that God had no involvement in its creation…that is a wonderfully scientific conclusion.
I wonder if no poems are ever created if some atheists will say ” …oh, I guess there is a god?” Not likely. They will say, natural selection had billions of years. Let this have a billion years and see what you come up with. LOL
Sheesh.
a) If there is no God then he didn’t make anything including the stupid poem
b) If there is a God, then he made you and hence the program, words and resulting poetry (ugly or not) are an indirect result.
Ahem. The apparent organization and planning of everything we see around us is not the measure by which Christians would “prove” the existence of God anyway. A lump of disorganized stuff, to a religious person, would be there because thats the way it was created just as much as an organized lump of stuff (a.k.a YOU) is there because you were created that way.
The true measure of ability to recognize the existance of God is a personal journey which cannot be shared or transfered. You must embark if you wish to know…but there are plenty who would be willing to help if you want to take that step.
I have come to understand that “intelligent design” is NOT what it sounds like. Intelligent Design, apparently, purports that NO evolution on any scale can occur.
I believe in God and acknowledge that he could have used any method to go about “creation” which could (and is likely) vastly different that what we assumed. Let me put it this way.
God created (or Oragnized, depending on your understanding of the translations of the Bible)everything.
Later scienetists will attempt to measure/observe such creation. The more accurately they measure/observe, the more likely that they will name the actual method of creation that God used.
With DNA they seem to be honing in on a pretty clear method. Unfortunately that picture is still far from clear and 100% researched. Who knows what twist they will find. *shrug*