“Octopus Arms May Point Way to New Robot Designs/a” talks about using octopus arms as a model for robot arms. It also has some peripherally related tidbits of interesting information. Of particular note, I noted an indication of the design in life on learning that octopi use their arms almost as if they had bones after they have caught their prey. This isn’t proof of design, is not meant to be, after all, it might turn out that is the ideal way to handle the situation, scientists looking at it as a model appear to be betting on that. If on the other hand there are two or more roughly equivalent ways to handle boneless arms, what makes this one the one of choice? Evolution would certainly not cause a critter to loose its bones, and so I assume that scientists would put octopi rather earlier on the branching than the development of bones. Thus this would have to be an example of “convergent evolution,” a case in which design makes a far better explanation: the designer favored certain patterns.

If that isn’t speculative enough for you, I’d like to consider something else. We have computer-organic hybrids (mentioned here/a), and we have robots potentially mimicking emotions and reproducing (mentioned here/a). Combine the two, and how do you tell the difference between the artificial and the real? In a rather humorous twist, I can only imagine creating something, loosing a few of it in the ocean, and then some scientist a hundred years from now “discovering” it and speculating about how it evolved. Of course it will be utterly ridiculous to say that this “new species” was created. ;-)