The geek rises

Okay, Robby the Robot was a robot. And no, that wasn't the one that kept going "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!" long before Will Robinson became Minbari. But that one was also a robot, called, reasonably enough, The Robot. Adam Link was a robot. On the other hand, Data wasn't; he, well, I guess I should say it, no, wait, the "fully functional" Data could be called he - he was an android.

But all in all, robots were thought of as more or less anthropomorphic. Except, of course, we soon learned that the most common form of robot was the industrial robot, designed to perform some repetetive task with great accuracy and which looked nothing at all like a human. Ah, so that's a robot! Well, not quite.

A robot is being used by a Franco-Swiss team to investigate how the first land animals on Earth might have walked.

The bot looks a lot like a salamander; and the scientists can change the way it swims, slithers and crawls with commands sent wirelessly from a PC.

The group says it provides new insight into the nervous system changes aquatic lifeforms would have had to acquire to move to a terrestrial existence. ...

By mimicking the nervous system and the movements of the salamander, the team hoped "to decode perhaps some of what happened during evolution", Auke Jan Ijspeert, of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, told BBC News.

While fossils give a pretty clear view of the development of vertebrates over time, just how they came to spread from the water where they originated onto the land is not clear. However,

the latest research indicates the transition would not have required a huge leap in brain power.

Mr Ijspeert and colleagues have shown how even the simple nervous system of a lamprey (a primitive eel-like fish) can, with a few modifications, drive walking motion in a creature that resembles a salamander.

Which is what their robot does, indicating the leap from swimming to walking is not nearly so great as some had thought. And once again showing that evolution is often cleverer than we give it credit for being.