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How robotics can offer clues to evolution

Josh Bongard, contributor

Darwin's devices.jpg

IN Darwin's Devices John Long plunges into a world of blue marlin, robot tadpoles, and scientists chasing the former and building the latter. A biologist and cognitive scientist at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, Long has done both in his time, and begins the book with the obvious question: why would a biologist build robots?

The answer: robots are fast becoming an important lure in the biologist's bait box. To demonstrate how, Long tours through evolutionary biology and biomechanics before homing in on two areas of robotics research.

The first, evolutionary robotics, involves breeding virtual robots using a computer that measures how well they perform a desired task. The computer then modifies promising robots and deletes poor performers. The process can evolve interesting or unexpected machines - though they bear little resemblance to any real animals.

Evolutionary biorobotics, then, deals with evolving robots that do resemble a particular animal. For example, Long and his students created swimming robots outfitted with tails, with the stiffness of the tails dictated by computer. Observing these tadpole robots, or Tadros, helps Long to understand real animals' evolutionary transition from notochords, or primitive flexible backbones, to vertebral columns.

These biorobots are the stars by which Long navigates for the rest of the book. Though he is a gifted storyteller, this is no simple fish tale. The engineering draw of robots is clear, but Long also emphasises the value for science, showing how robots can serve as physical models of biological organisms; evolving biorobots can shed light on why organisms evolved as they did; and robot interaction can illustrate coevolutionary dynamics, as between predators and prey.

Long gives examples from his own research throughout, and though some of the work requires detailed explanation - for instance his initial Tadros only had to swim towards a light source, but early vertebrates had other evolutionary pressures shaping their vertebrae - he keeps everyone in the boat while plumbing these depths by showing the human side of scientific discovery.

At one point he describes the abject sorrow of his research team when their robots evolve very differently from their predictions. Or how, as a graduate student, he fell for the stunning blue marlin, which must be studied in the wild because they die in captivity.

Ultimately, he squints at the horizon, describing the growing military interest in underwater robots and ending with a balanced meditation on the future, and ethics, of autonomous robots.


Josh Bongard is a computer scientist specialising in robotics and evolutionary algorithms at the University of Vermont in Burlington

Book information:
Darwin's Devices: What evolving robots can teach us about the history of life and the future of technology by John Long
Basic Books

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I usually try to avoid comments but sometimes it’s almost impossible. Robots are machines. This means per definition that they are inanimate things.
Machines are manmade objects, these things are created.
The software inside are programed by programmers, which means that the program is created.
It doesn’t matter how clever the program is or was, in the long run it was created. Don’t label a creation as a work of evolution, because it isn’t!


@ Karl
Then you don't understand evolution. The starting point may be different but the process they employ to develop biorobots is the same. That's what evolution is; a process and not a theory dealing with the starting point... created or not. Although incorrect, even if reality was created by an omniscient being at a single moment the evolutionary process taking place thereafter would be independent of the initial starting conditions as long as one self-replicating entity could generate imperfect copies with fitness conditional to the environment.

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