The Xenobots as Thought-Experiment. Teleology Within the Paradigm of Natural Selection

Abstract

The first organic robots built by Tuft and Vermont University researchers pose questions to philosophy and give it a new task. The xenobots embody what phi-losophers had attempted to define as teleology. This paper addresses the way te-los can be redefined, once liberated from the suspicion of vitalism. While Darwin-ism, through a theory of evolution based on the environment, has contributed to the elimination of telos, here a new view of biology is described, which shows how evolution can be fully explained through the notion of feedback, or inner re-sistance in a system, as preliminary condition for natural selection to work.