From “Darwin’s Devices,” John Long’s piece at Slate about evolutionary robotics, the use of futuristic tools to teach us about the past:
“My fellow researchers and I are using them to harness evolution, putting it to work as an automatic, hands-off process to go where no robot has gone before: the ancient past of animals and the unknown future of human technology.
Making robots that can evolve solves a serious problem that has long vexed biologists: Dead fossils tell no tales. While fossils inform us about evolutionary patterns, they don’t tell us about life’s processes, like the dynamics of physiology, behavior, and the ‘struggle for existence’ that Darwin recognized as the basis of the evolutionary game of life. We can reconstruct and re-enact those missing processes using biorobots, a special class of physically embodied and fully autonomous machines designed to mimic living and behaving animals.
At first blush, this field, called evolutionary biorobotics, seems to present a Zen koan: How does one use evolution to study evolution?”