Functioning ‘mechanical gears’ seen in nature for the first time

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Wow! That’s incredible.

It takes a while to get your head around this - evolution (or for those religious folk - gods design!) is an amazing thing…

Whilst I am in the former camp, there are some things in nature that make you wonder…

Where my head went to is building organic machinery. Imagine if a self building, self repairing machine could be genetically developed. Stuff of fantasy for now, but given enough time and research, why not?

One of the reasons why human intelligence has developed is that we harnessed fire, we’re able to cook food cutting down on the digestive requirements meaning we spend less time eating and extract relatively more nutrition than other animals, this then allowed the brain to develop.

Now imagine if we could develop an AI brain that was attached to a biological/organic machine that used a fueling mechanism of direct absorbtion of premanufactured nutrients.

Too much flying around in my head to thumb type on my phone, but…

And then from another angle… What if this organic gearing we have now discovered in the young of this bug is the last remaining evidence that we are all descended from a self removing biological machine created by aliens and sent out to populate the universe billions of years ago…

Think I need to write a book. :rofl:

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I know this is a relatively old video (2013) but it does pose the question how the heck did something like this evolve and wasn’t designed this way?

designed by who/what is another question entirely…

I wonder if the idea for gears that man developed can from a biological “memory” inherited from those three legged leaping critturs from Mars that we are descended from -
Oh! wait a minute that’s “Quatermass and the Pit”!! Sorry.

Seriously though nature will never cease to amaze us, from the smallest sub- particle to the largest thing we know of - the Universe.

I have read a lot of science fiction and there are a lot of theories out there - and many scientific ideas are used in science to give direction.

It only goes to show that there is an awful lot we don’t know, but we are finding out - but not all current theories will be accurate…

I understand the theory of evolution, in that there are natural mutations and if those mutations better fit the local environment they can have a better survival rate thus passing that mutation to their offspring - until that mutation is dominant. I also realise that this can take many many generations - the natural world has been evolving/mutating for millions of years - sometimes things do not change as the organism fits its natural environment perfectly, so does not need to evolve further.

However how the hell did some of the things that are now common place get there by mutation? How many mutations to get to a fully functioning eye and what are the intermediate steps? Surely as you are getting there, the mutations individually will not work and so should not survive - there are some huge jumps needed and simple mutations surely cannot make such large jumps.

I am a practicing Athiest, but perhaps I should be an Agnostic, as it is scientifically impossible to say that something does not exist, because you cannot see or understand it - this is one of the scientific principles - you come up with a theory and then test it, if it survives, it is good, if it fails, go back to the drawing board.

I disagree with religion per se, but some aspects of evolution are challenging without an overall plan - and that is nothing to do with religion.

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That’s pretty good, and basically sums up my views too :+1:

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Never underestimate mother nature, truly astonishing

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