Back at the dawn of time, the first terrestrial life forms crawled up from the primordial soup and would go on to evolve into creatures as diverse and mysterious as ring-tailed lemurs (collective “awwwwww” please), iguanas and Sarah Palin.

If this process fascinates you as much as it does me, considering that Sarah Palin can skin a moose, wear Alaska-shaped earrings without ridicule AND avoid media questions, all at the same time, Spore is the game for you. The hot, hot, hot time-spender was released earlier this month from the same guy that brought you “the Sims.” It allows you to start with a single celled organism and evolve it into any number of fantastical creatures, depending on any number of environmental variables. While this is a clever way to teach kids the theory of evolution, it’s also addictive for the grown-ups, some of whom have apparently indulged in creating rather, shall we say, vulgar creatures, a phenomenon known out there on the Web as “Sporn.”

Anything spawning its own double-entrendre-ready nomenclature qualifies as part of pop culture in my book, and I adhere to this truism: Where there is pop culture, there is opportunity.

Mobile gaming may not have taken off yet, but Spore (and Sporn)-a-holics out there might prove yet there is a viable business model to be had. EA Mobile has launched Spore Origins for the Apple Inc. iPhone and iPod Touch, and makes use of the accelerometer to maneuver your creature through the dawn-of-time gunk.

I’m not a big gamer, and I get pitched on game applications, like, ALL the time, and I’ve been cynical. But this Spore thing made me look into it further, and it appears the segment is being rethought.

For instance, an outfit called Cellufun also is taking a page from pop culture, this time the social networking phenomenon. Personally, I have a feeling that social networking is about to get real old, real fast...case in point, my friend Tanya’s status on Facebook, which she just joined, says: “Tanya is late to the Facebook party, which she predicts wrapping up sometime around December 2008.” But for now, it’s still worth exploiting.

And to that point Cellufun Friday launched a global WAP site for multiplayer gaming, which wraps in all those high-usage, time-wasting principles of Web 2.0, like blogging, points accrual for various things, blogging, customizable avatars, blogging and blogging. I think really it’s the blogging that will get people involved—everyone likes a good flame war. As long as they’re not in it.

This week’s Google Android G1 launch is drawing attention from the gaming community too, for its open app development approach. The similarly value-propped Apple App Store has yielded some profits for some gaming companies, but it’s suffering from some backlash at the moment, leaving Android looking pretty attractive. Accordingly, gaming bigwig Gameloft announced plans to develop more than10 titles for Android, to be launched beginning in the first quarter of 2009.

I guess we’ll see how it all works out. As in, will anyone make money from this besides the developers? Is it worth the time of service providers to worry about the space? Will there be a gaming evolution-spark to take it mainstream and out from its own primordial soup?

Who knows. In the meantime, please, please stop sending me Sporn (and you know who you are).