Watching robotic rats have sex could teach us more about evolution

Studying evolution is tricky, it’s a process that happens over countless generations and thousands of years, but the men tasked with studying it live less than a century. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have found one way around the problem: robots. OIST’s Dr. Stefan Elfwing has been using small, rodent-like robots to study the long-term effects of disparate mating strategies, observing the evolution of the simulated species for over 1,000 generations.