Abstract
This paper explores the case of using robots to simulate evolution, in particular the case of Hamilton’s Law. The uses of robots raises several questions that this paper seeks to address. The first concerns the role of the robots in biological research: do they simulate something (life, evolution, sociality) or do they participate in something? The second question concerns the physicality of the robots: what difference does embodiment make to the role of the robot in these experiments. Thirdly, how do life, embodiment and social behavior relate in contemporary biology and why is it possible for robots to illuminate this relation? These questions are provoked by a strange similarity that has not been noted before: between the problem of simulation in philosophy of science, and Deleuze’s reading of Plato on the relationship of ideas, copies and simulacra.
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Notes
The concept of kin selection has been controversial ever since—whether associated with sociobiology, evolutionary psychology or the biology of social behavior; see (Kurland 1980; Leigh 2010; Okasha 2001). In 2010 E.O. Wilson and Martin Nowak recently made themselves the object of some quite hostile and aggressive attacks in the biology community by suggesting that kin selection and Hamilton’s rule are wrong (Nowak et al. 2010).
Another set of unrelated researchers has explored metabolism using robots, though seemingly only to prove that a robot thus designed can keep itself running by consuming an “anaerobic or pasteurized sludge”: (Ieropoulos 2003; Ieropoulos et al. 2010; Lowe et al. 2010). They do not share the sludge with each other as far as I can determine.
The definition of “fitness” and “inclusive fitness” is hard to grasp here, but is related to the concept of foraging efficiency: essentially, over a given period of time foraging efficiency is determined by how many times the robots are successful at pushing food to the wall. An individual’s inclusive fitness (their own success at transporting food + the food shared with them) determined the probability of their genome being transmitted to the next generation.
There is some slippage between the terms “real” and “physical”—often the scientific publications in question use the two terms interchangeably. I follow their usage where possible, otherwise default to “physical” to refer to robots that are extended in space, use electricity and are built out of plastic, metal and other materials.
See e.g. (Chrisley and Ziemke 2006) Mitri et al. cite two influential books in cognitive science: Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience and Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World together again (Clark 1998; Varela et al. 1991). More recently, and directly relevant is the work of Josh Bongard, whose book (with Rolf Pfeifer) How the Body Shapes the way we Think: A new view of intelligence lays out the specifics of the “embodied turn” in both cognitive science and robotics (Pfeifer and Bongard 2007). The similarity to debates about the role of language and cognition within anthropology (Sapir and Whorf) and philosophy (Wittgenstein, Quine) is sometimes also noted, though more often this tradition is linked to phenomenology and a certain interpretation of Heidegger advanced by Hubert Dreyfus and taken up by some computer scientists and psychologists (Dreyfus 1999; Winograd 1995).
Frequently this claim relies on reference to Tinbergen (1951).
See for example, the projects available at “Teem The next generation open evolutionary framework,” available at http://lis2.epfl.ch/resources/teem/ (Last visited Jul 23, 2017).
To push this logic even further, it may well be possible to imagine creating, for instance, a 3D cinematic representation of a robot having a far better outward resemblance (and identical internal resemblance) of an animal or human than can be achieved with a physical, sculpted and manufactured robot. In this case, the simulated robot should by all rights appear to the right of the physical robot on the scale of situatedness, and not the reverse.
A similar example can be found in Lenhard, “Surprised by a Nanowire,” in which he discusses the “surprise” that comes from simulating physics at the nanoscale; Lenhard tames this surprise however, by calling it “pragmatic understanding” and reducing the simulation to a kind of tool by which theories become experiments, and subsequent experiments become confirmations or falsifications (Lenhard 2006a, b).
Smith argues that Deleuze dropped the concept of simulacrum and replaced it with that of assemblage, (Smith 2006).
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Acknowledgements
This paper is a revised and expanded version of a chapter with the same title that appeared in the volume Research Objects in their Technological Setting, edited by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Sacha Loeve, Alfred Nordmann, and Astrid Schwartz (New York: Routledge, 2017). I thank the editors of this volume for their permission to publish this revised version, and for their editorial and intellectual assistance. I also thank Janina Wellman and the MECS group at Leuphana University for the invitation to present this work and to include it in this series, and the editor of HPLS and three anonymous reviewers for detailed and helpful criticisms.
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Kelty, C.M. Robot life: simulation and participation in the study of evolution and social behavior. HPLS 40, 16 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0181-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0181-y