No Need for Intellectual Straightjackets.

The author comments on the perspective of researcher Barbara Webb on the need for animat research to seek more empirical validation which relates to her robotic modeling work on cricket phonotaxis. He notes the impact of Webb's plea regarding the exclusion of animat models from biology to extenuate the strategic problem related to the performance of acid test on an animat model. The presence of computational models in biology that do not suggest a concrete target organism is mentioned.