Abstract
In the sixth edition (1872) of Origin of Species, Darwin lamented: “Great is the power of steady misinterpretation.” He added a hopeful note that misunderstandings in science don’t long endure. But to this day, those about natural selection, the engine of creative adaptation, persist. One abstract notion that dogs evolutionary thinking is “perfection.” In the Galapagos Islands or the robotics laboratory, we see that evolution in-the-flesh suffices, selecting the best-but-not-perfect solutions from among a finite set of options limited by the constraints and trade-offs of physics and genetics. While we can identify different evolutionary processes in retrospect, the randomness that is essential to evolution preordains that outcomes cannot be completely predicted. But even without perfect prediction, we can know that evolving life forms and machines have limits.
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Long, J.H. (2019). Evolution Ain’t Engineering: Animals, Robots, and the Messy Struggle for Existence. In: Heffernan, T. (eds) Cyborg Futures. Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21836-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21836-2_2
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