3 ms·

You wonder how this near ideal shape could evolve. Maybe a pair of opposing plates preceded this to better sync the legs, and the plates became wheels to allow

You wonder how this near ideal shape could evolve. Maybe a pair of opposing plates preceded this to better sync the legs, and the plates became wheels to allow longer hops. Then adding bumps to each wheel is imaginable since it would sync a bit better. But a long series of identical deep evenly spaced detents along one wheel and a perfectly matched series of gear nubs on the opposing wheel is quite a bit more complex and a phylogeny that's not at all intuitive, to me anyway.

Vexs 11y ago
Evolution can be nigh-impossible to understand sometimes, but this one seems straightforward- as you mentioned, it was originally two discs, which gained bumps- bugs that had better bumps were more likely to survive, and thus the bumps probably became more defined and streamlined, forming ridges, and later "gears"- and if there's one thing the body likes to do, it's symmetry.
- dekhn 11y ago
  at the end of your last sentence, I'd generalize that to "if there's one thing the universe likes, it's symmetry."
marcosdumay 11y ago
Well, a long series of repeating patterns happen very often in organisms and have some well understood evolutionary paths. It was even Turing that discovered how some of those patterns form.
dekhn 11y ago
repeating patterns are common due to segmentation and gene duplication. I suspect, and I think a lot of others do as well, that the appearance of complicated new shapes occurs fairly commonly after mutation, as a consequence of the hierarchical structure of developmental gene regulatory networks and the process of cellular differentiation. In a sense, it could be there is a collection of "modules", and successful mutations involve mostly manipulation of the regulatory network of those modules, while the modules themselves don't change very often at all (at least in part because they have so many dependent processes). By combining expression of those modules with spatial patterning.

Vexs 11y ago

Evolution can be nigh-impossible to understand sometimes, but this one seems straightforward- as you mentioned, it was originally two discs, which gained bumps- bugs that had better bumps were more likely to survive, and thus the bumps probably became more defined and streamlined, forming ridges, and later "gears"- and if there's one thing the body likes to do, it's symmetry.

dekhn 11y ago
at the end of your last sentence, I'd generalize that to "if there's one thing the universe likes, it's symmetry."

marcosdumay 11y ago

Well, a long series of repeating patterns happen very often in organisms and have some well understood evolutionary paths. It was even Turing that discovered how some of those patterns form.

dekhn 11y ago

repeating patterns are common due to segmentation and gene duplication. I suspect, and I think a lot of others do as well, that the appearance of complicated new shapes occurs fairly commonly after mutation, as a consequence of the hierarchical structure of developmental gene regulatory networks and the process of cellular differentiation. In a sense, it could be there is a collection of "modules", and successful mutations involve mostly manipulation of the regulatory network of those modules, while the modules themselves don't change very often at all (at least in part because they have so many dependent processes). By combining expression of those modules with spatial patterning.