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The reason brains work the way they do is because evolution hill climbed to a solution, not because that solution is globally optimal. Compared to silicon, neur
by ggreer 7y ago
The reason brains work the way they do is because evolution hill climbed to a solution, not because that solution is globally optimal. Compared to silicon, neurons are absurdly slow. Axons transmit information at 100 meters per second. Electronics transmit information 3,000,000 times faster. When your switching speed is 100Hz, the only way to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time is to be massively parallel. That's why brains are the way they are.
Other points of comparison: Animal wings (birds, insects, bats) combine both lift and thrust, but we don't fly around in ornithopters. And while animal legs combine support and power for locomotion, we don't drive around in vehicles with legs. Wheels are far more efficient, but they're not something that evolution can discover easily.
- __s 7y agoThere's a few animals that have evolved wheels. Much harder to evolve an axle
- kbenson 7y ago> Wheels are far more efficient Wheels are far more efficient if you have a very specific type of terrain to deal with. It's not immediately obvious to me that a wheel is more efficient overall on naturally occurring terrain. For example, wheels don't work well on steep and rough terrain, or in water (as opposed to under water). The trade-off might be better stated as wheels are very efficient for very select terrain types, and that efficiency tapers off fairly sharply for some terrains, reaching 0% in some cases, while legs are less efficient overall, but achieve some level of usefulness on almost all terrains (making them a better choice for organisms that have disparate terrain types to deal with). Similarly, a computer may be much faster in some types of operations, but we can't even get it to do some stuff that's fairly trivial for many animal brains, so that may also be a trade-off in efficiency somewhere (possibly in an area we don't sufficiently understand yet).
- perl4ever 7y agoPossibly walking recaptures energy that a simple wheel mechanism wouldn't? I vaguely think I read something about how humans are fairly efficient at recycling the energy produced as you stride and gravity pulls you down.
- Gibbon1 7y ago> fairly efficient at recycling the energy produced as you stride and gravity pulls you down Ever walk on dry loose sand at the beach? Plod plod plod.
- clairity 7y agoyes, tendons, ligaments and even muscles are used to recapture energy as animals locomote. about 30% for walking is what i seem to remember from my grad school days. ggreer above shows some real hubris and a deep ignorance of the ingeniousness of biological systems compared to human-created ones. a brain (and nervous system) is miraculous in its ability to gather, assess, store and discard ambiguous and contradictory information at astonishing rates.
- perl4ever 7y agoI would take exception to the idea that evolution can't/didn't discover wheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase Everything from E. Coli, to yeast, to plants, to humans, is based on rotating molecular motors. Now, it is true that we don't see macroscopic wheels on living organisms. But a person or animal is composed of trillions of cells. By analogy, we don't see the millions of vehicles in a nation composing an entity that has wheels made up of vehicles.
- perl4ever 7y ago"About half of all known bacteria have at least one flagellum, indicating that rotation may in fact be the most common form of locomotion in living systems" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Physical_model_of_a_bacterial_flagellum.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Physical...