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First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

popularmechanics.com

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Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#171

Post by fakeanon »

GravityWell wrote: post #101
chockablock wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

non sequitur . Why does beauty imply the existence of an intelligent designer?

It doesn't. In this context, "...that I believe all living things" , the words "I believe" can be directly converted to "I have faith without any evidence" .

> It is for beauty like this that [I believe][I have faith without any evidence] all living things were originally designed by some intelligence, somewhere.

Looks like this for is as in "because", he is telling you why he belives, because of "beauty like this". You can only say you do not believe this evidence implicates that.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#173

Post by plaxtonquay »

flumbaps wrote: post #168
bernardom wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa. That blew my mind. So we're evolving in such a way to be able to make combinatorial multi-gene changes- by evolving brains big enough to be able to develop gene engineering?

I had this cool idea for a sci-fi book (I may one day write), set long after modern civilisation collapses. Humans survive but with all the readily available iron ore used up, we are perpetually stuck in a pre-industrial revolution world. Hundreds of thousands of years pass and we evolve. At this level of technology we can farm, so we're still very successful, and the biggest threats to us are diseases rather than pr…

Cool story bro

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#174

Post by agumonkey »

quasque wrote: post #120
agumonkey wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree I was a bit stunned. I've yet to see an organic wheel, many of the things humans discovered already existed in nature (cutting tools, chemicals, fire, ceramics), but the wheel seems to be apart from these.

Probably the closest to organic wheels are organisms that form a wheel-like shape in order to roll http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLS2WXZQxU

That's amazing. It lacks the load-bearing side of wheels + rod but anyway, thanks.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#175

Post by jerf »

upquark wrote: post #146
jerf wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution works by incremental changes, each of which to a first approximation must be at least neutral and preferably advantageous to producing offspring. In order for evolution to get from A to B, there must be a path of incremental advantageous changes to get from here to there. It can't magically leap from one optimum to another. So you see things like the way the same basic body plan is reused endlessly in the n…

Awesome post. About the "fantastic two-gene change": can't there ever be a force pushing for a species to obtain two independent mutations more or less simultaneously? What I mean by that is pressure on a species to maintain / promote a few existing mutations in the population (each individual may carry one, or the other, or none, but the offspring of carriers is likely to end up with more than one). I imagine in ver…

I wanted to keep it simple. All the details do get complicated, beyond even my comprehension (beyond anybody's, as far as I know, genetic science continues to find surprising things on a regular basis). Another semi-sort-of exception is bacteria, which can for instance trade large chunks of genes directly, though, again, not in a very directed manner. There's also quite a few "control" genes that exist where it may be a relatively simple mutation to change the length of an arm, or finger, or even just turn something off entirely, which can cause huge visible changes even though it was just one gene change.

However, in your first case, it sounds to me like you're talking about two changes, each of which are beneficial, or at least neutral. That wasn't what I was talking about, that happens all the time. I'm talking about changing two or three or four (or more) genes simultaneously in a way that each individual change, if applied on its own, would be detrimental, but the whole is an improvement.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#176

Post by kriro »

gizmo686 wrote: post #113
kriro wrote: post #42

Maybe a little cruel but I'd be interested in some sort of study where a large number of issus' are placed in an environment with a couple of predators. Repeat this with young and adult versions and see if/how much the gear system (adults don't have it) improves the odds of surviving attacks.

What you would be testing is how much of an advantage the young have over the adults. I find it extremely unlikely that the gears are the only difference.

Yes and the gears would be hard to isolate as the lone cause (adults have more experience fighting prey etc.) so maybe you'd have to genetically engineer two groups one with gears and one without.

Either way the hypothesis they gave as to why the gears are eventually mutated away makes sense but has me wondering why they don't keep replacing them instead of settling on living without them.

Thus I'd like to quantify the edge said gears provide as a starting point for the investigation :)

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#177

Post by javajosh »

muyuu wrote: post #130
m-photonic wrote: post #88

"They're rather specialized, and there are lots of other jumpers that don't have them, so there must be some kind of advantage." Not necessarily. Evolution has a lot to do with path dependence and in no way guarantees the best of all possible adaptations.

Almost every complex AND specialized adaptation has an advantage. In this case it seems pretty obvious that gears can be better than friction at transmitting torque.

Acne in adolescent humans is fairly complex, specialized, and life-cycle limited, like the insect gears, but acne doesn't appear to offer teens any advantage. Acne is just ..collateral from another (beneficial) process. Those gears are probably the same thing.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#178

Post by bnegreve »

m-photonic wrote: post #88

"They're rather specialized, and there are lots of other jumpers that don't have them, so there must be some kind of advantage." Not necessarily. Evolution has a lot to do with path dependence and in no way guarantees the best of all possible adaptations.

Isn't this the advantage?:

> Larger animals, whether kangaroos or NBA players, rely on their nervous system to keep their legs in sync when pushing off to jump—using a constant loop of adjustment and feedback. But for the issus, their legs outpace their nervous system. By the time the insect has sent a signal from its legs to its brain and back again, roughly 5 or 6 milliseconds, the launch has long since happened. Instead, the gears, which engage before the jump, let the issus lock its legs together—synchronizing their movements to a precision of 1/300,000 of a second.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#179

Post by iron_ball »

biomecha wrote: post #124
iron_ball wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God cannot feel pride, for that would imply the possibility of failure. God is beyond most human emotions, probably all, for that reason: our emotions imply their opposites, while for God, there are no alternatives other than what is -- which is by definition perfect. Mind you, I'm an atheist, so this is just my understanding of the argument.

But that's assuming that intelligence fit the definition of a unique, christian like perfect god. Why would it have to be? Isn't it limiting the scope unecessarily?

Absolutely. Christianity is just one possible frame.

Re: First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

#180

Post by vdaniuk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #108
boldfield wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm about to commit an HN faux pax here, but, citation? Off the top of my head I can think of traits which do not fit your assertion: vision in the 390-700nm wavelengths, hair/fur, eye placement (think predator v. prey), etc, etc.

I think GP used significant in a sense more like "newsworthy", in that, ceteris paribus , the perceived significance of a trait is inversely related to the frequency with which it has been seen in the past.

Yes, thanks, that's exactly what I meant.
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