Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Cyberman]

In a similar vein, can a robot design and built a robot that is better than itself? If so, lock one in a room with the raw materials and come back in a few years (enough for successive generations)... and unlock the door and expect to meet a god.

As Rhythm already answered this, quite correctly, I shall simply reiterate his reply and say yes, robots most definitely can do this. In fact you don't even need something as complex as a robot; ever heard of evolutionary electronics?

Evolutionary Electronics
is the use of evolutionary algorithms in the design of electronic systems. Evolutionary algorithms capture the bare essentials of Darwinian evolution - selection acting repeatedly upon heritable variation - but are in other ways very different from evolution in nature.

There are many potential applications for evolutionary algorithms in electronics, such as optimisation of parameter values or component placement & routing, test pattern generation, and even in the design process itself.

The focus of my own work has been to ask "What can evolutionary design do that conventional methods can't?" rather than trying to compete with conventional design or automate it. The papers below share this theme. Evolved circuits can have a richer spatial structure and internal dynamics than normally envisaged, and can extract unusual leverage from the physics of their medium of implementation --- be that microelectronics in simulation, physical silicon reconfigurable chips (FPGAs), or even proposed future technologies for nano-scale systems. Similarly, evolution can tune highly complex optimisation activities within Electronics Design Automation (EDA) tools with similar subtelty.

Terrible spelling but the principle's sound enough. Incidentally I had to spell his name like that because our Imperious Leader has hijacked every instance of that name, spelled properly, to render as - oh, just try it yourself if you ain't familiar with it.

Artificial evolution, such as a Genetic Algorithm, has many promising applications in electronics. These range from using it as an optimisation technique as part of a fairly conventional VLSI synthesis pathway, through to using it to design automatically circuits that could be of a very different nature to the way electronics is normally envisaged. We also apply our philosophy of artificial evolution to other domains of design: we seek to find ways of allowing evolution to explore areas of the "design space" not normally accessible.