Submitted by Sariel007 t3_108andc in Futurology
duh, humans are just biological machines evolved to be efficient
I wish this was obvious to everybody
True to some degree, but there are no wheels in the animal kingdom..so not all biological machines the most efficient
I'm just trying to picture how a wheel would look evolved on a living organism... like it would require the ability to spin freely and I can't think of a single thing that can do that in nature
There isn't , there are some animals that can coil themselves (centipedes, caterpillars) into a shape of a wheel/circle and roll or have the wind push them, but no none in the animal kingdom. I suspect because a free rotating wheel would be disconnected from the body that grew it...
I think the larger issue is that wheels don't scale well beyond flagellum type structures on a single cell; there isn't a path to scaling up to a larger wheel.
Which honestly wouldn't be that big of a problem, we've seen crazier stuff in nature before. The issue is that a wheel is a bad and inefficient design for the surface of Earth, which is rough, sloped, covered with stuff, dry, sticky etc. As humans we didn't invent only wheels, we also invented roads to go along with them and leveled rock formations, hills, forests etc to build them. In a fully natural world without roads, wheels are useless.
Probably because wheels aren't very versatile compared to limbs, you can't defend yourself with a wheel like a foot or a fist. Also biologically difficult to grow since youd need some way of controlling them but I can't think how you'd do do the physical attachments in a biological sense since animals tend to be made up of long stringy fibers or hard shells.
Planthoppers have gears, if that counts
"Breaking news: Planes look like Birds.. coincidence? We think so!"
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