Darwin’s Devices

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DARWIN’S DEVICES: What EVOLVING ROBOTS Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology

I AM A BIOLOGIST, AND I STUDY ROBOTS. BUT AS SOON AS I started describing my research to other people, it was clear I was in trouble. I was speaking to a longtime friend and colleague about a biology grant I’d just gotten from the National Science Foundation to build robots when he stopped me in my tracks. “What do robots have to do with biology?” he asked. I knew then, with the certainty that only dread can provide, that this was an inescapable question—it was the issue that would come up first from now on, every time one of my students or I presented our strange new work to biologists.

What’s the problem? First and foremost, biologists do not study robots. They work on organisms—living things, their environments, and their evolutionary history. They use machines as tools to ascend a rainforest canopy, as instruments to measure biomechanical properties, as modes of transportation to collect fish from a coral reef. As my friend had stated so succinctly, machines in general, and robots in particular, have nothing to do with biology—from his point of view. Not from mine.

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