As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity’s deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long’s new book, “Darwin’s Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology,” is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.

Long works in a field called biorobotics, which builds physical devices to test hypotheses about animal behavior, rather than studying either the animal itself or digital models. Sometimes an animal can’t be studied for logistical reasons: marlins, for example, die in captivity and plesiosaurs are extinct. Computer models allow scientists to simulate complex, unreproducible conditions — say, the modeling of 10,000 generations of a particular organism — but as abstractions, they are prone to certain errors.

Robots, as Long explains, have their peculiar virtues. Long himself once created an impressive computer model illustrating how the marlin’s backbone helped the fish achieve its awe-inspiring swimming and leaping speeds, only to have a revered elder scientist note, “it appears to me that you’ve created a perpetual motion machine.” Robots, as Long points out, can’t violate the laws of physics. Instead of operating in a simulation of a physics-compliant environment, robots simply exist in the real universe, and must therefore play by the rules as a matter of course. At the same time, robots can be simplified to the degree that certain characteristics can be observed in isolation.

The main thing Long uses his robots to study is evolution. His first robot-fish experiment involved creating a bunch of large, tadpole-like “Evolvabots” designed to do one thing: swim toward a light source. With his team of students and fellow scientists — Long makes a point of mentioning the names of everyone who made significant contributions to his projects, a big departure from spotlight-hogging senior-scientist tradition — he rated their success at this imitation of “food-seeking” behavior. The robots (called Tadros) were given tails of varying degrees of stiffness and length and were then “mated” (algorithmically) over several generations to see if this would lead to selection for certain kinds of tails. The hypothesis Long and his colleagues wanted to test was that primeval invertebrates evolved backbones because it improved their ability to feed.

The experiment didn’t work out as they’d hoped, mostly because, in designing the experiment, the scientists had failed to fully appreciate a factor called wobble. One of the most intriguing and important aspects of “Darwin’s Devices” is the way it places the reader in the lab, at the shoulder of people doing hands-on science, sharing in their frustrations (over disappointing data, recalcitrant grant committees and astutely critical colleagues), their successes and their failures. And Long does this so lucidly that you find yourself caught up in the process, grasping the basics and eager to learn the results. It’s the best depiction of how science really works that I’ve ever read.

“Darwin’s Devices” could also administer a chastening rebuke to the many laypeople who talk and think sloppily about evolution. Determining exactly how growing a backbone helped ancient invertebrates thrive might seem superfluous to the quick-and-dirty school of cocktail-party Darwinism. Obviously, backbones helped because otherwise vertebrate animals would never have evolved. But as “Darwin’s Devices” illustrates, we can easily mistake the reasons for the evolution of certain traits by jumping to what seem like “logical” conclusions, and natural selection is not the only evolutionary pressure applied to a species. There are times when you just have to build something to understand how it works.

For example, the next type of robot Long and his colleagues developed they named Madeleine (because it is shaped, roughly, like the little French cakes). Madeleine had four paddles at each corner of its body, much like the extinct plesiosaur, a marine reptile. This creature was a tetrapod: a sea-dwelling animal descended from land-dwelling ancestors. Living aquatic tetrapods include whales, dolphins and sea otters, but “none of the living aquatic tetrapods ever use all four appendages to swim underwater — they only use two.” With Madeleine, the researchers hoped to figure out why this is so, since “it sure seemed like using four flippers for propulsion should be better in almost any way imaginable.”

It isn’t, actually, and that launched yet another branch of inquiry about why the plesiosaur used four flippers at all. If it’s that easy for legitimate scientists to be mistaken about something as seemingly simple as four-flippered locomotion, you can see why so many of them regard popular but highly speculative pastimes like evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience.

One party who has found the activities of Long and his robotics lab keenly interesting is the U.S. government. It’s not a big leap from “robot fish” to the notion of defense applications, and Long, despite a youthful infatuation with all things military, finds this troubling. But not that troubling! After a bit of hemming and hawing about it — noting that, if over 50 nations are pursuing military robot research, then American scientists can’t afford to opt out — he plunges into rampant (and, I must say, fascinating) theorizing about what sorts of robots would work best in battle. They need to be complex enough to cope with contingencies, but simple (i.e., cheap) enough that commanders aren’t afraid to burn through them.

Long ends with these cautionary words: “The reality is that evolving robots are and will be created for academic, industrial and military purposes. This means that we should all become students of robots of any kind, whether they be evolving robots, nonevolving autonomous robots, or semiautonomous and remotely controlled military robots. We need to understand robots so we can proceed with due caution and deliberation.” Yikes! And probably true. “Darwin’s Devices” will get some of us, at least, a little closer.

We watched through the video, and decided — in the keeping with the pageant theme — to hand out awards.

Winner: Lauren Carter, Miss Vermont, who said:

I think evolution should be taught in schools, because not everybody has the same religious backgrounds, and it’s important to have scientific facts about the world. We do know that evolution exists even on the small scale, like … bacteria that are becoming resistant to drugs and what not, so [we] might as well learn about it.

(Carter earned bonus points for referencing micro-evolution.)

Worst Answer: Kia Hampton, Miss Kentucky, who said:

I honestly don’t think you can ever have too much knowledge on any subject. That’s my personal view. But I do feel that evolution shouldn’t be taught in school, just because there are so many different views on it, so many definitions. How do you teach a child the true meaning of evolution when so many different cultures have their different beliefs, and sciences have their different theories. It’s just not a good subject that I feel everyone would agree on in classrooms, when kids come from all different backgrounds, different cultures, different beliefs. So, I just personally don’t think its a good topic for school, at all.

Weirdest Answer: Sarah Chapman, Nevada, who said:

I think evolution can be taught in many different ways. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about people, and how people evolved. It can also be about [how] communities [evolved] as well.”

Overall, we counted 24 answers in favor of teaching evolution in school and 3 against, with 24 equivocating to some degree — oftentimes, but not always, arguing the impossible but impossible-to-argue-with goal that  everything should be taught. The contest’s winner, California’s Alyssa Campanella, answered with an unequivocal “yes.” Runner-up Miss Tennessee said that evolution should be taught, but people should be able to decide for themselves. (We also counted that as a “yes.”)

As an addendum: It does bear mentioning that even among the women who answered in the affirmative, many seemed to be under the impression that evolution is not already taught in schools. That, in fact, might have been the most head-scratching thing about the video. Oh, well…

How is it possible for females of a species to breed with males from past or future generations? For brine shrimp, it’s actually easier than you might think. Science writer Carl Zimmer explains:

Brine shrimp produce tough eggs that can survive through droughts for years and then hatch into healthy young when water returns. In the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the brine shrimp egg cysts form layers on the lake bed going back decades. [Study leader Nicolas] Rode and his colleagues gathered cysts from layers that formed in 1985, 1996, and 2007. They brought the cysts back to their lab and reared the sea monkeys. And then they orchestrated some sea monkey sex. They had females mate with males from their own time, as well as from the other years. For example, females from 1996 could mate with males from 2007 and 1985.

What happened next? Zimmer summarizes:

Rode and his colleagues … discovered … that having sex with males from another time is bad for a sea monkey’s health. The further away in time the sea monkeys were, the sooner the female sea monkey died. When the male traveled 22 years to mate with a female, her life was cut short on average by 12%.

The report’s suggestion that female shrimp are better suited to mate with their contemporaries than with males from the past or future seems to corroborate the theory that “sexual conflict is an ongoing process,” with males and females adapting new mating “strategies” in concert or in competition with each other over time, Zimmer writes — although it’s still not clear what sort of pattern the conflict might follow (nor is it obvious, in this particular case, exactly “how the time-traveling males [harmed] the females”).

Just to be safe, though: If your dream historical dinner party with Cleopatra, Henry VIII and Napoleon ever does happen, you might want to consider heading home early.

So why hedge? Well, someday — maybe someday soon — he may want the support of Kansas Republicans. And sometimes, successful Republican politicians begin debasing themselves to win the votes of far-right rubes well before they begin forming exploratory committees.

Here are some signs that your formerly rational Republican governor (or former governor, or mayor, or representative) might be planning a presidential run:

Candidate develops doubts about evolution

Evolution, a scientific fact, is not recognized by one of America’s two major political parties, and a majority of Americans are either creationists or at least express “doubts” about evolution, so it just makes sense for people seeking the Republican nomination to align themselves with people who think the Earth is 10,000 years old.

But belief in evolution correlates to education level, and most of the elites in politics and media are well-educated, so you don’t want to become a creationist — then you will be mercilessly mocked — you just need to signal your tacit support for creationism and promise to let it be taught in schools. Just like Chris Christie did!

Candidate suddenly agnostic on or openly hostile to climate science

Not that long ago, most Republicans agreed that climate change was real and something should be done about it. Nearly everyone currently running for the Republican nomination supported cap-and-trade, which was the moderate alternative to a proper carbon tax. Now, though, not so much!

Now, even those who still profess to believe in climate science think the government shouldn’t do anything to stop it (the “reasonable” Jon Huntsman approach) and the rest of them no longer think climate change is happening, because Al Gore, who is fat, is also now divorced (the shameless Gingrich approach).

Candidate suddenly has opinions about foreign policy

A governor does not really need to know what to do about Iran or North Korea, but if one suddenly starts telling everyone his or her ideas about what to do about Iran and North Korea, this governor is probably dreaming of the nation’s highest office. (Or at least a Senate run.) If those ideas seem to just involve bombing everyone, everywhere, this guy’s serious! (If the candidate becomes a paleocon isolationist instead, no one will allow them anywhere near the nomination.)

Another hint: A non-Jewish politician suddenly becomes deeply, passionately interested in Israel.

It’s a red alert if your governor reveals these positions in a book of some kind.

Candidate no longer thinks the government has the right to collect revenue on anyone by any means

Most governors and state legislators have to balance their state budgets, and to balance state budgets during horrible times like these, lots of taxes (often renamed, as in Tim Pawlenty’s Minnesota, “fees”) are necessary. But current Republican orthodoxy has it that any taxation, at all, on anyone, is a tyrannical attack on LIBERTY itself.

So they will defend their “fee”-raising as not taxation while demanding that the national deficit be taken care of within three years without a single tax increase on any American. That is leadership. (Plus, you want Grover Norquist on your side.)

Candidate no longer likes transportation projects

Sure, free federal cash for a major infrastructure project sounds great on paper, and also in reality, but Republicans hate trains now, so you better turn that money down, even if you formerly campaigned for it. Trains are for Europe!

If your governor checks off two of these, get worried. If he or she hits three, get ready for the major Politico story on the Republicans Secret Weapon (or Reluctant Best Shot).

This rich cultural history makes kissing seem so natural as to be fairly unremarkable, which is why many readers will greet the new book “The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us” with skepticism. How much is there to say about locking lips, anyway? A whole lot, it turns out. Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, gives an engaging overview of the possible evolutionary basis for two people mashing their mouths together — a practice that is actually pretty odd, once you think about it. There’s the way sexy red lipstick plays on our hunter-gatherer past, how swapping spit can help us develop immunity against disease and why it might have first developed as a way to literally sniff out genetically appropriate sexual partners.

That’s not to mention the tremendous variety in kisses the world over — from the Eskimo to the French variety — and that’s just in the human world (bonobos, for example, will suck on each other’s tongues for as long as 12 minutes). Salon spoke with Kirshenbaum about how our lips are “genital echoes,” the natural high of making out with a longtime crush and how technology will change kissing.

What is it about lips, why are we so drawn to them?

There are several theories. For starters, psychologists will tell you that red grabs our attention. I spoke to a neuroscientist and he thought it might have something to do with our ancestors looking for ripe fruit. Those that could detect the color red could find food the fastest and they had an advantage and survived to pass on their genes, and that might be why we notice the color red.

Red became pronounced in different areas of the body, and it became a sexual cue over time. Certain parts of the female anatomy, especially with our primate ancestors, were enhanced with red, and it especially had to do with the female being ready to reproduce. As our ancestors began to walk upright, rather than males being attracted to the female’s posterior, they began to focus on the breasts and the lips — they call this “genital echoes.” In research on lip color, men consistently choose the women wearing the bright red lipstick as the most attractive — there’s this power to making the lips slightly redder. There’s a lot of evidence to back up the existence of the makeup industry.

Much to my surprise, you make a connection between kissing and breast-feeding. Can you explain that?

Nursing is a very pleasurable activity. The lips are so sensitive to stimulus, and the hormone oxytocin, which is involved in social bonding and attachment, is stimulated in the infant and the mother during nursing. We start to associate this bonding with lip pressure. As adults, when we kiss there’s this rise in oxytocin, which is so important in new relationships and in maintaining relationships. Nursing is very important in putting those neural pathways in place. When our lips are stimulated later in life there are these associations with those early experiences.

What about non-romantic kissing?

It’s a really powerful means of expressing yourself. All of our senses are engaged in the behavior. Traditionally, scent was so important in terms of recognizing our friends and family members. In prehistory they were using scent to recognize each other and assess the health of someone. Social kissing probably evolved from a sniff to cheek kissing. It’s one of the most powerful things we can do to connect with another individual.

How do kissing styles vary from culture to culture?

The mouth-to-mouth kiss that we recognize is definitely not the only universal style of kissing. Charles Darwin wrote about this: He suspected that if you talk about kissing in terms of touching the lips to any body part, and even behaviors like licking and blowing, then it’s probably a universal practice.

Traditionally, many cultures around the world didn’t mouth-to-mouth kiss. It was probably not the same experience before there was mouthwash [laughs]. I went into all these historical accounts written in the 1800s, mostly by European explorers. There’s this great anecdote where an explorer goes to Africa and falls in love with the daughter of an African king, and one night he’s brave enough to kiss her. She reacts by screaming and running from the room. He realizes later that she thought he was planning to eat her.

Has kissing changed much over time? Do certain styles of kissing come into fashion?

Well, I love the French kissing story. It turns out that when people were traveling through Europe, there was this notion that women in France were more openly affectionate. There became this saying: “While in France, get the girls to kiss you.” That sort of evolved to be: “Get a French kiss.” But in France they don’t call it that, they call it a “tongue kiss” or a “soul kiss,” because it’s supposed to feel like two souls merging.

What happens physiologically when we kiss?

A lot. It depends on the kind of kiss, of course. If you’re talking about a good kiss, our pulse quickens and our pupils dilate, which is probably part of the reason we close our eyes. There’s also a rise in dopamine, which is responsible for the craving and longing, that can’t-wait-to-be-with-you sensation. It’s also stimulated by a lot of recreational drugs like cocaine; kissing sends us on a natural high. Dopamine spikes from really longing for something for a while and then getting it. When we’ve been dreaming about someone for a long time and then finally get it, dopamine is involved.

Serotonin causes obsessive feelings about someone. It’s also the same neurotransmitter involved in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It sounds a lot like the symptoms of falling in love. Everyone loves to talk about sex, but kissing is probably the most intimate activity we can engage in. Look at the history of prostitution — prostitutes won’t kiss their johns because they don’t want to get their emotions involved. And, overall, johns aren’t that anxious to kiss their prostitutes either.

There’s a strong gender divide in how we view kissing, isn’t there?

Absolutely. There’s a huge gender divide. In one large study of college-age students, strong patterns emerged: Women were constantly complaining about too much tongue and men were saying, “I really like wet kisses, lots of saliva!” The guys were usually eager to foray into sex without kissing and very few women were. Women paid a lot more attention to the teeth and breath of the person. Men tended to say they would consider starting a relation with someone just because they were a good kisser, and women were not that way. The act of kissing has a lot more significance for women than men. Men tend to report that kissing is a means to an end; women tend to try to figure out what the kiss means about their relationship, what it says about how their partner feels toward them.

Why might this be?

I started getting really frustrated by these findings, because I felt the results were very stereotypical. So I got together 80 of my own friends and acquaintances, and I was pretty shocked to see that they fell almost completely in the same pattern. When you start looking at reproductive strategies, it makes sense: A woman puts a lot more investment into the [sexual] decisions she makes, because she is fertile for a much shorter period of time each month, and a man can theoretically inseminate countless women throughout his life. Women are a lot more sensitive to smell and taste, which can tell a lot about a partner’s health and reproductive capacity.

There’s a great study looking at attraction and scent. It turns out that women are able to identify men who have a very different genetic code from their own, and they tend to be more attracted to them, because if they mate, their children would be healthier and stronger and more likely to survive because of the diversity in their genetics. Interestingly enough, women who are taking the birth control pill seem to have the opposite reaction. They’re more attracted to men with genetic immunities similar to their own. It starts to make you wonder what all these hormones that we take are starting to do to our bodies and whether they’re masking these signals that we’ve developed over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. I came across some pieces asking, “Is it possible that for some couples divorce is a result of the woman going off hormones and all of a sudden feeling less attracted to her partner?” It’s certainly an important question to ask.

What can we expect from the future of kissing?

There are robots that are very eerily lifelike and starting to be able to kiss each other — it’s pretty convincing when you see the actual video. In terms of virtual reality, it might be possible that it could feel like you’re kissing your idealized partner or celebrity.

Just last year, a robot debuted called Roxxxi. She’s supposed to be the first sex robot. I called up the company and spoke to the engineer because I wanted to know whether she could kiss. His response was, “No, but her mouth is one of three inputs.” It turns out kissing was not something they had programmed in. At the time they were about to debut their robot geared toward women and, given all this psychological research, it might be something that women clients would be more interested in seeing.

Speaking of technological changes, what about online dating — how is it changing the courtship process?

Many of my friends were going online looking for love just as I was learning about all these important cues other than what we see in a profile — things like voice and touch and smell taste. We are flying blind when we’re dating online. We’re only able to see a photo and a carefully worded profile. You might invest a lot of time getting to know someone and it might be imminently obvious when you’re actually in the same room that it’s star-crossed, or you might pass over someone who might have seemed ideal if you’d been in the same room together. A kiss just tells you so much more than a poke or a wink — or whatever it is, depending on the service you’re using. I’ve been calling it nature’s litmus test.