This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. … - Valentino Braitenberg

[The final chapter of the book] sketch a few facts about animal brains that have inspired some of the properties of our vehicles, and their behavior will then seem less gratuitous than it may have seemed up to this poin.t

Ad Aertsen succeeds in allowing his sense of humour to shine through the deep seriousness of his scientific ethos. He also has a very balanced attitude to the question of "theory or experiment".

The brain is encased in the head, the part of the body which in most walking, flying or swimming animals is the leading end of the moving body (with few exceptions: starfish, cuttlefish, humans, penguins when they are not swimming). The obvious risks which this localization entails are apparently compensated by the advantage of direct short connections with the sense organs localized in or on top of the head (olfaction, taste, vision, audition, vestibular sense), which together with the brain could be seen as something like the cockpit of the animal, or the pilot if one prefers.