Adaptive Form
Adapting the Form of Robots
The conditions the robots will encounter are unknown. Their programming must include a wide variety of adaptive behaviors. The robots must have enough autonomy and intelligence to choose behaviors strategically from an on-board “bag of tricks.”
Beyond adaptive behavior there is adaptive form or structure. If we study the different kinds of robots sent to the Moon before human exploration began there, we can trace an adaptation of form.
At first aerospace engineers knew very little about surface conditions on the Moon. Astronomers could see that the Moon’s surface is covered with craters. From the rain of meteors and meteorites that fall into the Earth’s atmosphere, they rightly predicted that the Moon’s airless surface must be covered with dust. They did not know how deep the dust was. Also, they could not predict if the layers of dust were stable. What if the layers slid easily over one another? Could astronauts walk upright on the Moon? Or would they slip and fall, and sink down into a layer of dust so thick it would swallow them? One cannot send people, no matter how brave, to encounter extreme, unknown conditions. It was sensible first to send robots.
Aerospace engineers doomed to destruction on arrival the first robots they sent to the Moon. The robots were simply automatic cameras that looked forward and took pictures as they approached the Moon. Each successive television frame came from a closer range, showing a smaller and smaller area in greater and greater detail. The last frame was always incomplete because the crash ended the transmission.
The next series of robots had considerably more structure. NASA designed them as three-legged vehicles with large footpads, and endowed them with a rocket motor that fired between their legs. This arrangement allowed the robots to make soft landings on the Moon. They had no wheels or moveable leg joints and couldn’t travel anywhere. They couldn’t even level themselves if one of their feet happened to land on a rock.
All the robots carried a camera. NASA mounted the camera on swivels to take photos in almost any direction. The camera could only rotate and look up and down through a narrow slit, but the operators pasted the pictures together into a complete panorama. Especially, NASA’s engineers made sure they could focus the camera on the robot’s footpads.
The first footpads were excessively large because no one knew how big they had to be to stay on top of the dust. The pictures of the footpads were very important. Engineers studied the pictures to find out how deep the pads sank into the dust as they bore the weight of the robot.
NASA designed the footpads for the manned lunar landing module and the astronauts’ shoes in accordance with earlier findings. The later footpads were smaller than earlier ones in relation to the weight they had to bear. The engineers had a better idea of just how large the footpads had to be. NASA did not make the footpads excessively large because the engineers wanted to reduce the weight of the footpads themselves. The savings in weight permitted adding extra instruments and capabilities to the mission payload.
From this story we can see that aerospace engineers modified the form or structure of the robots in accordance with new purposes and better knowledge of conditions. This is creative design. Let’s note, however, that it was the designers who had the creativity. None of the robots that reached the Moon had either sufficient artificial intelligence or mechanical capability to adapt its form to unforeseen conditions. Once the robots found the terrain stable, none of them could take off its oversize footpads and use the unnecessary material for some other purpose.
Aerospace engineers have to develop robots to explore unknown environments before human exploration can begin. A design goal is always to program in adaptive behavior, especially as the exploration sites become more and more remote and timely consultation with Earth-bound controllers becomes impossible. A higher design goal would be to provide adaptive structure, but at present that is still a science fiction dream.
However, the farther we send robots, the more we may have to think of things like that. We would like to find ways of programming adaptive behavior and even adaptive form. That will be creative design at its best.
The Origin of Adaptive Form Variation
Darwin was a creationist. He submitted to the scientific world the idea that God may have used the mechanism of adaptive form variation to create the different species. In Darwin’s vision, small adaptive form variations might accumulate in some individuals of one species until they became a new species.
The confirmed biological examples of adaptive variation under environmental pressure are evidence for highly creative design programmed into nature. But how did it become programmed? Were random mutation and survival of the fittest enough to establish a capability that engineers cannot yet imitate, or did a great, pre-existing intelligence design all life forms?
Darwin’s Idea Extrapolated to Darwinism
Distinct from Darwin’s idea of adaptive variation is a concept we will call Darwinism. Darwinists believe that all living species including humankind are naturally selected variations of a common ancestor. Furthermore, they hold that the common ancestor, the first microorganism, arose from lifeless chemicals because of a very improbable accident. At that time, perhaps 3 800 million years ago, or maybe much more recently, certain chemical substances made a fortunate combination and generated the first life form that survived and reproduced itself. Darwinists say that the event was so unlikely that it couldn’t have happened more than once on the Earth. All present living organisms are descended from the first microorganism. Random variation and natural selection, acting over hundreds of millions of years, have produced the rich variety of life forms on Earth, according to Darwinists.
Classifications range through kingdoms, branches, phyla, classes, cohorts, orders, families, tribes, genera, and species. Some authors simplify the classifications by leaving out branches, cohorts, and tribes. There are the plant, animal, and fungi kingdoms and usually two kingdoms for one-celled organisms. Protista cells have a nucleus and prokaryote cells do not. Within species (such as dog or cat) there are varieties (like spaniel or retriever).
It was not Darwin, but others, notably Thomas Henry Huxley (British biologist, 1825–1895), who seized on Darwin’s idea and extrapolated it into the proposal that all the species arose from one primordial life form by natural selection without any intervention from pre-existing intelligence. Huxley took the origin of species and extended it back to the origin of the first microorganism. He also extended it to the origins of genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, and kingdoms.
The Development of the Sciences
Most of the sciences had precursors in superstition and magic. These outdated ideas continue to plague the sciences. Astrology came before astronomy, alchemy preceded chemistry, shamans tried to heal before there was medicine, and pantheons of gods and goddesses took charge of every mysterious phenomenon before cosmology was a science. There were fertility rituals before science discovered agricultural fertilization and assisted reproduction.
The first stage in the history of a science is descriptive. The scientific facts come from careful observation. For example, many medicines owe their discovery to careful classification of the beneficial effects of various herbs. Later, experimenters arrange to make their observations under controlled conditions. Analysis of experimental data helps to form mathematical models. The models develop into a body of theory. At a certain stage of development, theory can occasionally predict previously unobserved phenomena. Theory, full grown, leads to the uniform treatment of a wide range of seemingly diverse phenomena. In physics this last stage, the era of unification theories, is the most recent development.
Physics, chemistry, biology, social sciences, and psychology are all at different stages of development in the scheme outlined above. They also progress at different rates, allowing of course for growth spurts when great scientists arise.
Biology is not yet as precise a science as physics or chemistry. Some of its branches, like genome sequencing, are advancing rapidly toward greater precision. Talented biologists are working on provable hypotheses and quantitative experiments, not description and speculation. They now make computer simulations and do meaningful experiments to confirm their hypotheses before publication. Darwinism, however, remains where it began, in the 19th-century descriptive phase. The so-called “theory of evolution” is no more than a set of plausibility arguments.
Darwinists propose the spontaneous growth of unplanned complexity. Their proposal is incompatible with the known laws of physics. The most general physical law relevant to the Darwinist notion is the second law of thermodynamics. In later chapters we will study how the second law applies to living systems. The precision sciences of thermodynamics and information theory exclude the spontaneous production of information.
Beyond adaptive behavior there is adaptive form or structure. If we study the different kinds of robots sent to the Moon before human exploration began there, we can trace an adaptation of form.
At first aerospace engineers knew very little about surface conditions on the Moon. Astronomers could see that the Moon’s surface is covered with craters. From the rain of meteors and meteorites that fall into the Earth’s atmosphere, they rightly predicted that the Moon’s airless surface must be covered with dust. They did not know how deep the dust was. Also, they could not predict if the layers of dust were stable. What if the layers slid easily over one another? Could astronauts walk upright on the Moon? Or would they slip and fall, and sink down into a layer of dust so thick it would swallow them? One cannot send people, no matter how brave, to encounter extreme, unknown conditions. It was sensible first to send robots.
Aerospace engineers doomed to destruction on arrival the first robots they sent to the Moon. The robots were simply automatic cameras that looked forward and took pictures as they approached the Moon. Each successive television frame came from a closer range, showing a smaller and smaller area in greater and greater detail. The last frame was always incomplete because the crash ended the transmission.
The next series of robots had considerably more structure. NASA designed them as three-legged vehicles with large footpads, and endowed them with a rocket motor that fired between their legs. This arrangement allowed the robots to make soft landings on the Moon. They had no wheels or moveable leg joints and couldn’t travel anywhere. They couldn’t even level themselves if one of their feet happened to land on a rock.
All the robots carried a camera. NASA mounted the camera on swivels to take photos in almost any direction. The camera could only rotate and look up and down through a narrow slit, but the operators pasted the pictures together into a complete panorama. Especially, NASA’s engineers made sure they could focus the camera on the robot’s footpads.
The first footpads were excessively large because no one knew how big they had to be to stay on top of the dust. The pictures of the footpads were very important. Engineers studied the pictures to find out how deep the pads sank into the dust as they bore the weight of the robot.
NASA designed the footpads for the manned lunar landing module and the astronauts’ shoes in accordance with earlier findings. The later footpads were smaller than earlier ones in relation to the weight they had to bear. The engineers had a better idea of just how large the footpads had to be. NASA did not make the footpads excessively large because the engineers wanted to reduce the weight of the footpads themselves. The savings in weight permitted adding extra instruments and capabilities to the mission payload.
From this story we can see that aerospace engineers modified the form or structure of the robots in accordance with new purposes and better knowledge of conditions. This is creative design. Let’s note, however, that it was the designers who had the creativity. None of the robots that reached the Moon had either sufficient artificial intelligence or mechanical capability to adapt its form to unforeseen conditions. Once the robots found the terrain stable, none of them could take off its oversize footpads and use the unnecessary material for some other purpose.
Aerospace engineers have to develop robots to explore unknown environments before human exploration can begin. A design goal is always to program in adaptive behavior, especially as the exploration sites become more and more remote and timely consultation with Earth-bound controllers becomes impossible. A higher design goal would be to provide adaptive structure, but at present that is still a science fiction dream.
However, the farther we send robots, the more we may have to think of things like that. We would like to find ways of programming adaptive behavior and even adaptive form. That will be creative design at its best.
The Origin of Adaptive Form Variation
Darwin was a creationist. He submitted to the scientific world the idea that God may have used the mechanism of adaptive form variation to create the different species. In Darwin’s vision, small adaptive form variations might accumulate in some individuals of one species until they became a new species.
The confirmed biological examples of adaptive variation under environmental pressure are evidence for highly creative design programmed into nature. But how did it become programmed? Were random mutation and survival of the fittest enough to establish a capability that engineers cannot yet imitate, or did a great, pre-existing intelligence design all life forms?
Darwin’s Idea Extrapolated to Darwinism
Distinct from Darwin’s idea of adaptive variation is a concept we will call Darwinism. Darwinists believe that all living species including humankind are naturally selected variations of a common ancestor. Furthermore, they hold that the common ancestor, the first microorganism, arose from lifeless chemicals because of a very improbable accident. At that time, perhaps 3 800 million years ago, or maybe much more recently, certain chemical substances made a fortunate combination and generated the first life form that survived and reproduced itself. Darwinists say that the event was so unlikely that it couldn’t have happened more than once on the Earth. All present living organisms are descended from the first microorganism. Random variation and natural selection, acting over hundreds of millions of years, have produced the rich variety of life forms on Earth, according to Darwinists.
Classifications range through kingdoms, branches, phyla, classes, cohorts, orders, families, tribes, genera, and species. Some authors simplify the classifications by leaving out branches, cohorts, and tribes. There are the plant, animal, and fungi kingdoms and usually two kingdoms for one-celled organisms. Protista cells have a nucleus and prokaryote cells do not. Within species (such as dog or cat) there are varieties (like spaniel or retriever).
It was not Darwin, but others, notably Thomas Henry Huxley (British biologist, 1825–1895), who seized on Darwin’s idea and extrapolated it into the proposal that all the species arose from one primordial life form by natural selection without any intervention from pre-existing intelligence. Huxley took the origin of species and extended it back to the origin of the first microorganism. He also extended it to the origins of genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, and kingdoms.
The Development of the Sciences
Most of the sciences had precursors in superstition and magic. These outdated ideas continue to plague the sciences. Astrology came before astronomy, alchemy preceded chemistry, shamans tried to heal before there was medicine, and pantheons of gods and goddesses took charge of every mysterious phenomenon before cosmology was a science. There were fertility rituals before science discovered agricultural fertilization and assisted reproduction.
The first stage in the history of a science is descriptive. The scientific facts come from careful observation. For example, many medicines owe their discovery to careful classification of the beneficial effects of various herbs. Later, experimenters arrange to make their observations under controlled conditions. Analysis of experimental data helps to form mathematical models. The models develop into a body of theory. At a certain stage of development, theory can occasionally predict previously unobserved phenomena. Theory, full grown, leads to the uniform treatment of a wide range of seemingly diverse phenomena. In physics this last stage, the era of unification theories, is the most recent development.
Physics, chemistry, biology, social sciences, and psychology are all at different stages of development in the scheme outlined above. They also progress at different rates, allowing of course for growth spurts when great scientists arise.
Biology is not yet as precise a science as physics or chemistry. Some of its branches, like genome sequencing, are advancing rapidly toward greater precision. Talented biologists are working on provable hypotheses and quantitative experiments, not description and speculation. They now make computer simulations and do meaningful experiments to confirm their hypotheses before publication. Darwinism, however, remains where it began, in the 19th-century descriptive phase. The so-called “theory of evolution” is no more than a set of plausibility arguments.
Darwinists propose the spontaneous growth of unplanned complexity. Their proposal is incompatible with the known laws of physics. The most general physical law relevant to the Darwinist notion is the second law of thermodynamics. In later chapters we will study how the second law applies to living systems. The precision sciences of thermodynamics and information theory exclude the spontaneous production of information.