Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us about the History of Life and the Future of Technology is professor John Long’s new book, describing his work at Vassar College with robotic “creatures.” Director of the Robotics Research Laboratory on campus, Long builds biorobots meant to mimic actual extinct animals – sharks, tadpole larvae, 400-million-year-old jawless fish called Drepanaspis gemuendenensis – for the purpose of discovering how the real ones might have evolved. His “evolvobots” are subjected to evolutionary pressures. They compete for mates and resources. Then he “mutates their genes” to produce “the best solution for the time and place.”
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