Intelligent Robots Evolving [Collective Imagination]
Adaptive behaviors evolve rather indirectly. If you look under the hood of a car you can see the physical mechanisms that convert exploding fuel into forward motion, and it all makes sense. Each part has an obvious, engineered role. But if you look under the hood of a cell, you will find that things are very quirky, because a lot of genetically specified molecules are doing things distinctly different from the tasks associated with various ancestral forms of those molecules.
And when it comes to neurologically specified behavior, things get even quirkier. The relationship between neural systems and externally visible behavior is very rarely "sensible" in any human-percieved way, and if we add in genetic components it is even stranger.
A recent essay in PLoS Biology explores this idea in relation to Robots that undergo Darwinian selection.
This short paper is very much worth a read. Go have a look and come back and comment!
This is about Intelligent Design, in a way.