How come evolution never developed the wheel?

Note how crankshafts, etc. are lubricated: force the oil into a passage in the axle and let it out through openings into the rotating parts.

It's the start, who knows what will be used as by-products for future constructions.When full autonomous replicating automatons are developed, are they life or something that evolved from life?Enjoy

Well, Will Smith called it a can opener so I'll go with that.I'm more interested in the cybernetic implants the then humans will be sporting. We have nothing to fear from AI. Quite the contrary. We will be the AI.Homo Sapiens Cybernetus.

Wheels aren't very effective underwater where animals first evolved. It was much easier to evolve fins into limbs than into wheels, not to mention that limbs are much more effective on land than wheels. Try chasing down a deer in a forest with a wheeled vehicle and you will soon learn how much better limbs are than wheels.

Or on the African savanna. Whether herbivore or carnivore; limbs work better than wheels in chasing down the most succulent healthy grass or biggest kudus.

Tumbleweeds. Seed dispersal is often based on flying turning things.There is a desert spider that curls up and rolls down a sand dune just like a wheel.There must be a zillion more I just need to remember them.So your point is moot.

Wheels aren't just used for locomotion. We use them in gear boxes - effectively as levers. We use them in pulleys and as rotation devices. But the owl can't do a full 360 degree rotation for a reason - a wheel-like device can't be innervated or be supplied with blood without wrapping the pipes around the axle.

Not true. The crank shaft in your car is a fancy wheel and has passages for supplying oil through the connecting rod to the piston. Electric motors have brushes or bushings for passing electric current to the rotor (a wheel) and these could also be used for passing signals as they are in rotating radar antennas. Not sure how these would work for nerve signals which are a combination of electrical and chemical.

What are you talking about? Wheels work much better underwater than limbs. Think propeller. Heck, in the microscopic world the flagellum is practically a spinning wheel propeller anyway.

And it works really well, in single celled organisms. The only multi cellular organisms with flagella, to transport the organism, are like Volvox colonies with individual cells each having a flagellum. They all beat and the spherical colony kind of tumbles through the water. We also see flagella functioning as turbulence generators that cause water to stream around the organism bringing potential nutrients close.These work because they are single cells that do not have to provide nerve and molecular exchange mechanisms connecting the "wheel" appendage to the main body.Evolution works at modifying existing features rather than inventing the best solution humans can think up.

Eukaryotic flagella like those of Volvox do not work on a wheel and axle principle, they flail around like whips. The International Society of Protistologists recommends that they should instead be called cilia, since they are homologous with cilia rather than with bacterial flagella. Etymologically it would make more sense the other way round, since flagella should flail, not rotate, and I think the eukaryotic examples were described first anyway.

Good information, thanks.I was thinking of cilia as what I see on Paramecium and Stentor where they are shorter and have a synchronized beat, where as, on Volvox they don't seem to be synchronized.Anyway, it is one of the nice things about EvC, learning new stuff.

You two are talking this thing, yes? click to enlarge.

That's the bacterial one that rotates like a wheel, yes. Many eukaryotes have a structure that looks superficially similar, but is unrelated and completely different structurally. It doesn't rotate, but is bent back and forth by the movement of the microtubules inside (pic below); kind of like how muscle fibres work.

It did if you find one in nature. (posteriori bias). Which highlights how easy it is to use circular reasoning and merely ATTRIBUTE design to evolution based on hindsight.Logically evolution is merely GRANTED, because if they found an organism tomorrow with a wheel, then they would infer evolution did come up with one after all.My question is, how can anyone know what to expect from evolution? If you don't necessarily know what it "may" come up with how can you be sure it came up with everything we do know exists? If you reason, "because it exists", you commit circularity. (circular reasoning).Everything that does exist in biology, they say evolution did design(posteriori), and they make no predictions for what it will come up with. That way they just get to SAY "evolution did it" if they find it, and didn't do it if they don't find it.It seems to me a fair apriori prediction would be that we should find a wheel in many species because it's a relatively simple design............ahh but they would object, "no we shouldn't, because we don't find it and evolution doesn't have to take that path". But how convenient.But my predictions are FAIR Lam, and you know they are. Think about it, it's a fair prediction to say "earlier" layers should show evolution's trials and errors, but we find the most sophisticated eye design in the Cambrian, for trilobites. So instead this doesn't fit with evolution but will be ATTRIBUTED to evolution, because the eye exists in that early layer.The basis for saying evolution has the ability to make something is only based on whether that trait exists, it would seem, which logically is no basis at all for believing evolution can invent anything Lammy boy my lad.-----Example of posteriori bias;Two men with shares in a blind garage sale. One has 51% the other 49%, the former says, "I have majority, all antiques we find in the garage will belong to me, all non-antiques to you."
They open the garage and there is a brand new perfect Ferrari standing there and the same guy says this;
"oh and I forgot to say, all machines will also belong to me."Conclusion: He only said that AFTER the fact.If you can't predict anything evolution will do, how can you predict everything it did do? Logically the problem is that we can't differentiate between everything that exists being what it did do, and everything that exists being attributed to what it did do.(will take some thinking about.)