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First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
61–70 of 191 posts
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#62Does that mean the patent for the gear is now invalid?
No, the issus is obligated to pay royalties.
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ghostery adds some weird play button you have to click to view the article, not sure what that is but it's new and annoying.
It's not. The button is there to temporarily (or not) enable a tracker, when it's necessary for function - apparently, Ghostery decided the text is behind a tracker. It's strange though, I'm using Ghostery too (latest version), nothing enabled, and I didn't get the play button.
You're right, they did decide it's an ad - the div all the text in has the id "intelliTXT", who do that annoying thing were individual words become advertisements if you mouse over them.
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#64I can swear I saw pictures of this years ago. I a series of lectures by different speakers. This can't be a new finding.
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#65In other words, we, human beings, are just reinventing natural occurring (or may have been extinct) mechanics and are putting patents on it.
Okay if you own a patent and sued someone for it, it's time to hand back the money!
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution. Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. There was pressure on those mutations to proceed toward gears since the gear mechanism is a potentially successful o…
It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. If this were the case, would you not expect to observe these evolutionary steps in other organisms today? As noted in the article: ...there are many jumping insects like the…
Statistically, it is very likely that at any given point in time there will be only one species with the trait that humans consider significant.
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#67[deleted]
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution. Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. There was pressure on those mutations to proceed toward gears since the gear mechanism is a potentially successful o…
It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. If this were the case, would you not expect to observe these evolutionary steps in other organisms today? As noted in the article: ...there are many jumping insects like the…
> If there are "many jumping" insects, how does it come to be that only a single specie (that we know of, granted) that has evolved this feature, and why have we not observed others undergoing the evolutionary process that could/would yield them in others?
Because evolution isn't planned, it involves selection from randomly[1]-occuring variations each of which has a extremely low probability. Certainly, we see some some traits that arise independently in different populations in different places with similar traits and are preserved and develop in similar ways, but the fact that a feature that contributes to fitness arises uniquely in one place is far from surprising.
[1] well, really, many of the processes are highly-chaotic more than random, but that's beside the point here.
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution. Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. There was pressure on those mutations to proceed toward gears since the gear mechanism is a potentially successful o…
It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics. Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. If this were the case, would you not expect to observe these evolutionary steps in other organisms today? As noted in the article: ...there are many jumping insects like the…
Because mutations are random. Evolution doesn't result in the ideal designs for everything, just the best (or good enough) of the random mutations that happen. OTOH, if we were designed by something, why would the designer not use the optimal leg designs for all the jumping bugs?
Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's never been a dichotomy between organic and mechanical. All things that move are mechanical. 'Mechanical' simply refers to motion. 'Organic' is a similarly blurry categorization. The terms you're looking for are 'natural' and 'artificial,' as in "of nature" and "of artifice (created by man)." These are natural gears, which are so surprising because we'd long assumed the gear itself to be an artificial concept.…
> All things that move are mechanical. How is that blurry? > 'Organic' is a similarly blurry category I thought "organic" was restricted to carbon chemistry. Seems pretty specific to me. > The terms you're looking for are 'natural' and 'artificial,' It may be that his choice of words conflicts with his meaning, or at least conflicts with your interpretation of his meaning, but doesn't make his original word choices l…
When I'm talking about "blurry" categorizations, I'm talking about how connotation has blurred what was once a very clear denotation. As in, the literal meanings of words like "organic" and "mechanical" -- which, as you've put it, are not ambiguous in the least -- are being challenged by modern associations of these words outside their original definitions. (A good case in point would be the grandparent comment, which used these words in connotative form to make a point about their denotative meaning).
"It may be that his choice of words conflicts with his meaning, or at least conflicts with your interpretation of his meaning, but doesn't make his original word choices less specific in their inherent meaning."
Not sure I understand what you're saying here. My point is that the words he used were used to frame a false dichotomy, and that the use of more precise words for what (I interpret) he was trying to get at would have improved his thought experiment. As I mentioned, I think he raised some good points, regardless of word choice.
As I also mentioned, "mechanical" (literal) and "organic" (literal) do not form a dichotomy; they are not mutually exclusive categories. Surely you would agree here, as you seem to be saying as much.
"Maybe I'm too far down the rabbit hole, but the Industrial Revolution hadn't even occured to me. There is plenty of mechanical action in the human body, and those have certainly been solids long before Latin came around."
Again, see my point about connotation vs. denotation. The IR is roughly when connotations about the word "mechanical" started muddying the waters. (We should note that the ancient Greeks, from whom the word 'mechanics' descends, were certainly prolific engineers in their own right -- but they were careful not to blur the lines the way English has).
At any rate, I brought up this point simply to give the OP some credit, i.e., that I can see how it's easy to use the word "mechanical" to refer to "artificial," given that modern-day connotation is heading in that direction. This was a side point at best, though, and not the focus of my post.
I apologize to you, and to the OP, and to any unfortunate readers of this discussion, for dragging us down what is indeed a rabbit hole.