/sci/ - Science & Math

>Why haven’t any organisms evolved to get around with wheels
because there is no smooth transition from legs to wheels that is conducive to a species reproducing

Because wheels are better than legs only when you are on a road, which don't exist in nature. Wheels are useless in most wilderness areas.

better question is why haven't humans invented vehicles that have legs
answer is it's hard to make legs

>>11197634
>imagining a duck getting around on little wheels
>sides in orbit

>>11197636
That makes sense, thank you science anon
>>11197661
What about off road wheels?
>>11197669
If it’s harder to make legs then it would make more sense for nature to give us wheels

>>11197675
it's harder to make legs but anything without legs would die instantly

>>11197634
>make wheel
>environment isn't perfectly flat, can't climb hill
>die

Also you would need somewhat complicated mechanisms to grow wheels, since supplying nutrients to a continuously spinning part of your body is nontrivial.

>>11197634
Bacteria do not "evolve".
"Living creatures" that you mention are of unknown origin.

>>11197686
The wheel could be just made out of bone with cushion to accommodate the environment, and it could propel the animal toward simply by using some sort of lung or air sack that blows into a free spinning gear attached to the outer wheel.

>>11197688
Of course they do. Why wouldn't they?

>>11197688
>bacteria do not evolve
explain how they can adapt then

wheels exist in nature. They're all over the place. From bacterial flagellum, to tumble weeds, even dung beetles use wheels.

but, wheels only work on a flat surface, or swimming in a liquid. It's a highly efficient but highly specialized mode of transportation. Highly specialized species are not adaptable, so if their living conditions abruptly change they can't change with it and they quickly go extinct.

>>11197694
Or you could just make legs, which are way simpler and more efficient then whatever you're thinking up

>>11197699
So you’re saying if we want this to become a reality we’re going to have to turn all of our woods in to pavement roads. Seems like a hefty price but it’s all about planting trees that you’ll never see the shade of in your lifetime.

>>11197670
duckroll

>>11197694
Bone needs nutrients to grow, so without it being anchored to the body with blood circulation, it would erode and break. It would just be easier to evolve a body that can roll for locomotion, and that doesnt exist.

>>11197670
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HP362ccZBmY

>>11198845
>It would just be easier to evolve a body that can roll for locomotion, and that doesnt exist.

akshually

If you look at a house fly it behaves like a gyroscope rotating, trying to think of creates than have anything spherical or hooped shaped that could adapt into a wheel or some kind.

the wheel is too complex methinks, i reckon u might be a bit insane to think of this.

>>11199468
sry hands are cold, its -6oc, typos.

prob more likely to have a helicopter animal.

>>11197686
>Also you would need somewhat complicated mechanisms to grow wheels,
It turns out life is already one level above somewhat complicated.

>since supplying nutrients to a continuously spinning part of your body is nontrivial
A flagellum already accomplishes this, and compared to other life processes like DNA copying it's quite "trivial" (only comparatively speaking of course, it's quite friggin complicated). And yes even the supplying nutrients part. It's called flagellar regeneration.

>>11197675
>What about off road wheels?
Watch some rock climbing videos of both off-road vehicles and mountain goats. Legs are pretty good.

>>11199717
But what about animals that don’t need to climb mountains and have more use in scurrying around prairies and flat deserts. In your post you mention how useful a proper set of off road wheels could be. The non climbing animals could just have wheels while the mountain goats have leggos.

helicopter seeds are technically wheels because they spin. Yes, literally anything that spins can be defined as a wheel.

>>11199810
Rally cars get stuck in desserts and prairies too. Wheels will fail you and then you die.

>>11200884
>Wheels will fail you
>and then you die.

never forget

>>11197697
Usually it's just shifting of the expression of genes within a population (but that is very basic definition of evolution anyway, coincidentally) It's like dumping a bunch of rabbits in a wintry climate where snow is on the ground 60% of the year; the white ones will express their genes more due to better evasion from predators.

So when you say
>explain how they can adapt then
You're basically saying explain how they can fulfill the very basic definition of evolution which is design to be correct by default. It's rather circular.

"Adapting" truly "novel" features is very rare and only quasi observed in bacteria a few times that I'm aware of. The issue is we don't truly know if they're adapting with truly novel features or it's just dormant already-existing genes being re-expressed in the particular experiment. The 30 year ecoli experiment is a good example. Some of the authors pointed out that extrapolating from the 1 in trillions of bacteria that showed a new ability to metabolize citrate we would expect that it happens in nature every few SECONDS what took 30 years in a lab. But it's just not very beneficial so it's never expressed further in nature. So the "novel" evolutionary feature shown in that experiment may not really have been novel: the genes were there already but just re-expressed or "turned back on" if you will.

You'd have to analyze the entire e-coli genome and verify the feature was non-existant in any fashion before you could truly say evolution allowed it to adapt to the lab experiment. I'm sure we could do that someday, but not quite yet.

>>11200886
Good example, thanks.

>>11200909
Based creationist

>>11200886
>never forget
The history that you're referencing is result of the NASA "spaceworthiness" doctrine which governs the assembly of spacecraft and the sourcing of the parts. Spaceworthiness is supposed to be a step up from airworthiness and so what NASA does is order an excess of the best, most expensive, best machined parts they can and then they sort through the parts themselves to find the best of the best. The spaceworthiness ideal was thought up and adopted during the early manned spaceflight program and NASA has stuck with it ever since, but there is a dissenting group which says that for some unmanned projects, of which the Mars rovers are a good example, spaceworthiness should be scrapped and they should instead use all of the airworthy parts and spam out 50 or 100 rovers instead of just one and if a few of them fail due to lack of parts inspection then you still end up with way way more science in the long run without adding any costs because spaceworthiness parts inspection is just as time consuming and involved as the assembly of the parts.
The people who make that argument might neglect mentioning that the spaceworthy Mars rover was so well built that it outperformed it's expected lifetime by a couple thousand percentage points.

Imagine the joints. Oh god.

>>11201010
why not inspect all the parts build one perfect rover and then use the leftover parts that weren't total garbage to make shitty rovers to send as backup

>>11201046
Doing it that way doubles the costs involved.

>>11197634

>>11197634
no moron. Machines are incomplete creatures instead

>op doesn't know about hoop snakes

wouldn't last a second in the bush

>>11200217
you make my head spin anon, im wheely confused right now!

>>11202079
ROFL

Because evolution is bullshit and there is no natural telology

>>11197634
>machines
not even close

>>11203184
Explain how we’re different

>>11199810
You mean like quadrupeds like horses, gazelles, zebras and such, who can not only scurry around the plains but also jump over gaps and ridges, cross mud and wet terrain, jump up ledges and run up steep hills?
Legs are much better than wheels for anything that isn't pavement.