Isn't that the guy who ruined Spore?
Dr. Wikipedia claims he had been working on Spore, particularly animations, and been blamed for Spore's rather unscientific vision of evolution, but it seems that it was the general attitude of most of the Spore team that preferred diversity in creations over, you know, making sense.
We didn’t want there to be one ultimate design direction that the simulator was forcing all the creatures into.
As you can see from this quote, Maxis does not get evolution.
Err, what? I won't gainsay the statement that "evolution" in Spore is kind of spotty compared to actual theories of evolution, but that quote doesn't do anything to support that. Scientific evolution doesn't have a single ultimate design direction, either. It merely expresses a trend towards optimization geared towards survival through natural selection and differentiation through speciation; it doesn't imply there is a single "ultimate" evolution, nor does evolution "force" anything.
Exactly. Evolution does not work on level-up basis. And yet Wright believes that unless you make the creator as shallow as it eventually was, everyone would end up with one single ultimate design.
For instance, length and width of joints would affect how they would work, so, e.g. leg A gives 1 speed compared to leg B of the same length, which gives 2, but a long leg A is faster than a very short leg B, or creatures that look like they have some serious muscles in their arms would hit harder.
All of those were axed, because then you couldn't make creatures which are dramatically unfit to their environment, and Creature Creator ended up as a very accessible, if limited, version of Blender for J. Random Player.