Philosophy On The Mesa

It took 50 generations of robots evolving from basic light-sensitive wheeled mechanisms to something much more sophisticated—but now the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology can boast of having created four groups of robots who have evolved into light-consuming and communicating entities. Three out of the four groups will alert the other robots when they “find food.” The final group has developed robots who will lie about the food source, telling the others that it is poison, and then eat it all themselves. And if that isn’t enough, some robots have evolved into heroes who will alert others to danger and die saving the others. In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) calls human altruism a “precious Darwinian mistake.” So does this mean that any evolving, communicating entity will travel along the same path as we humans have? Here is a quote from the original report summary:

 “We conducted repeated trials of experimental evolution with robots that could produce visual signals to provide information on food location. We found that communication readily evolves when colonies consist of genetically similar individuals and when selection acts at the colony level. We identified several distinct communication systems that differed in their efficiency…. Under individual selection, the ability to produce visual signals resulted in the evolution of deceptive communication strategies in colonies of unrelated robots and a concomitant decrease in colony performance. This study generates predictions about the evolutionary conditions conducive to the emergence of communication and provides guidelines for designing artificial evolutionary systems displaying spontaneous communication.” 

So the “liars” were unrelated to the others, while communication went smoothly if the individuals were genetically similar. Without having read the entire report I will jump to the conclusion that the “heroes” came from the genetically similar groups. But does this prove that Dawkins is right (Moriae, weigh in!), or that this is no “mistake” at all—that self-sacrifice will happen, because being a member of a colony fosters genuine selflessness? Then again, maybe the researchers at the Swiss lab have merely reinvented an ant hill…