My version of Intelligent Design

At the beginning, there is a programming class and a bunch of gods sign up.

In the first class, the language RNA is introduced. The gods learn to write programs like “hello world”. RNA is a simple language and it is executable without compiling. A lot of short greetings (rhinoviruses) are introduced to the world. They have a lot of variants and are constantly changing, like “what's up”, “how are you”, “anything new”. Other greetings (for example, poliovirus), like “how do you do”, are almost out-of-date now.

In the second class, a more stable language, DNA, is introduced. DNA has to be compiled to RNA before it is executed. The gods still find the class rather easy and generate a lot of other short greetings to the world again.

But programming is more than greeting the world. The instructor starts to teach the gods to write functions that take parameters and return values, or call other functions. As a result the gods do their homework and turn in some prokaryotic organisms.

The instructor also wants the gods to be nice programmers. The good habit of commenting your code is emphasized. Originally the functions are rather short and easy, and comments only existed in the “inter gene regions”. But soon the commenting habits get so popular and the functions become rather complicated. As a result commenting within a function becomes prevalent and you see a lot of “introns”. Introns most likely do not matter for the function, but it makes it easier for other programmers (sometimes yourself) to understand what your intentions are. However, a bad habit also emerges. The gods do not like deleting anything anymore. Whenever they want to make a change to a chunk of their code, they copy and paste it in the same genome, comment one copy out, and work on the duplicate. This way they can always keep the older copy in case they screw up the working copy. Their programs get longer and longer and there are many repeated regions in the full program. Since storage is not a big problem they never bother deleting the junk codes.

Why is there so much resemblance among species? The short answer is plagiarism. The gods borrow old homework from gods in a higher grade and they copy each other’s homework too. They do not want to get caught so minor changes are introduced. And of course, everybody copies from the book numeric recipes.

At midterm, the instructor assigned a big project. One god gets so obsessed with the project and he spends hours and hours in the computer room. He calls his project the dinosaur. His classmates like this program a lot and many begin to play with it. Changing some parameters here and there, they create many variants of the program. Everyone is having fun until one day the instructor was informed by the lab TA that some program is taking too much memory of the server. There are other CS classes that have to use the server too, he said. Dinosaur processes are killed and banned from the computer lab forever.