> If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a duck?
No, if it doesn't do everything else a duck does. You can have a robot dog, but you won't need to take it to the vet, feed it, sweep up it's hair, let it go outside to go potty, put up a warning sign for the mailman, or take it for a walk. You can have a simulated dog do all those things, but then how accurate will the biological functions be in trying to model it's physiology over time?
Will it give us insights into real dog psychology so we can better interact with our pets? Or does that need to happen with real dogs and real human researchers? Wildlife biologists aren't going to refer to simulated ducks to research their behavior in more depth. They'll go out and observe them, or bring them into the lab.
I suppose that's where a nematode is interesting — it's maybe juuuust simple enough that a real nematode on a plate of agar (as described in the article) might be able to be simulated well enough that we could actually make useful, and even long-term predictions about it based on a mere model.
Not to say I'm fully convinced, but I can see the appeal.
This is an interesting point really. At what level of duck-ness do we decide that it's acceptably close to a duck? I agree that taken ad-absurdum, just because something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it doesn't mean at all that it is a duck. I can enclose a raspberry pi in a fake duck and it will fulfil the above criteria, and perhaps from a distance it can be mistaken for a duck, but it has practically nothing to do with ducks. At the same time, it might be enough if our objective is to make some low cost garden decorations :)
What I'm trying to say is: as long as the simulation fulfils the objectives set out, it's useful, even if it is very far from the real thing.
Then the next question is: what are the objectives here?
> I can enclose a raspberry pi in a fake duck and it will fulfil the above criteria, and perhaps from a distance it can be mistaken for a duck, but it has practically nothing to do with ducks. At the same time, it might be enough if our objective is to make some low cost garden decorations :)
Agreed, it depends on what data you want out of the simulation. If you want to see how your dog will react to a duck, maybe it's good enough. If on the other hand you want to see how a duck will react to getting poked, well... your raspberry pi is worse than useless.
Assuming a dog only cares about how a duck sounds and not how it smells. We know that wouldn't work for other dogs. Which brings up something about simulating other animals. They're not human, and likely have sensory experiences that differ from our own. Perhaps a nematode worm is simple enough that we don't have to worry, but a dog or a duck are complex enough that we might leave that part out of the simulation. Or just not know how to fully simulate dog olfactory processing.
On this note, I'd like to recommend Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", which goes beyond the what was adapted in "Blade Runner" on many fronts, but particularly in regards to what it feels like to own a robotic animal (or a flesh one for that matter).
>Wildlife biologists aren't going to refer to simulated ducks to research their behavior in more depth.
I'm pretty sure behavior is simulated all the time in everything from migration to predator prey dynamics, to population dynamics, and so on. If we don't use simulations to understand all the little nuances and idiosyncrasies of behavior right now that's probably just because at present that's extremely difficult to model. But I suspect they absolutely would be used if such things were available. Of course, they would be treated as complementary to other forms of data, but wouldn't be disregarded outright.