Why didn't any animals evolve to have wheels?

You can't scale up a flagella motor into a macro wheel. The chain of proteins transferring energy from ATP to the shaft won't work if it has to operate across billions of proteins on macro distances. It will be lost in the ambient heat of the whole mechanism. Unless an organism can also evolve an electromagnetic motor it won't work.

ok

Why didn't animals evolve to communicate via electromagnetic waves
Why did animals not evolve to survive in space

Why do dicks get big

for FUCKING

legs are actually way better than wheels.

>Why didn't animals evolve to communicate by electromagnetic waves
What are we doing right now :^)

Typing

>The chain of proteins transferring energy from ATP to the shaft won't work if it has to operate across billions of proteins on macro distances

They skipped wheels and went to wings which is much more simple biomechanically and offers a better way to escape.

>evolve legs into wheels
>being chased by a predator
>encounter a small ledge
>get eaten

>jump ledge

the ATP is powered by dissolved sugar too isnt it

>bump into ledge
>get eaten

Because none of the intermediary steps on the way to functioning wheels are anywhere near as adaptive as the wheels would be.

What an asshole

>i dont understand the fundamental differences between multicellular and unicellular organisms: the post

We'll fuck.

You're gonna have to buy me dinner first

Explain

It's counter-intuitive, but you can't always just scale up really small structures and still end up with something that works e.g. giant insects in old monster movies wouldn't be able to support their own weight if they existed in real life as scaled up versions of regular insects.

Meant to say well fuck. Google's autocorrect algorithm is killing it.

There was an alien species in the last book of the Golden Compass series that rode around on wheels, but the environment was really contrived for it. It rested on two things;

1. The planet they were on was volcanic in a way that was constantly creating rivulets of magma that would run over the surface, solidifying into road-like things. They weren't entirely smooth but they were there.
2. There also existed trees on this planet which produced huge, really hard nuts, and these had evolved along with the aliens to become wheels; the aliens had learned to ride the nuts and had eventually developed limbs specifically adapted to being stuck into the nut's evolved empty center to form a pretty good wheel.

They would have one spoke-limb in back and one in front, and then some limbs in the middle for pushing and walking around when not on wheels. Eventually the nut breaks and then the aliens plant it somewhere and tend for it because they rely on these trees to get around.

>learned to ride the nuts
gay

...

I don't think wheels are energy efficient for animals like turtles.

yer insides would get all twisted up if they spun around

Because they evolved wings instead.

Flying > wheels.

It's amusing that you assumed wheels were an efficient form of transport just because humans have them and animals don't.

No but they would be fast as hell for a few brief seconds.

Because, except for in the case of the flagella, it is unlikely that there is a feasible solution to the problem of crossing the bearing. How would the vascular system cross it, for instance?

And if there is a viable solution, the necessary mutations and selection for those mutations has yet to arise sufficiently.

You acting as though the evolutionary process works towards a goal, other than that of simply increasing genetic fitness.

that's not simple wheels, that's suspension, balance, axles, tyres, tubes and airpockets. All of that shit for mediocre and unadaptable transportation means.

Was gonna post this, pretty nice all in all.
It would also be possible in some dried mud deserts I'd think, and on ice plains.

Also I guess wheels are irreducibly complex, i.e. the intermediate steps between walking around and having a wheel are not beneficial.

How would the evolve wheels

There are some rolling animals though, like that type of snake that holds is own tail and rolls downhill, and probably some roly polies do the same.

The blood transfer problem could be solved by making the wheel a separate animal with its own metabolism that lives in symbiosis with the car-animal, who feeds it.

Why didn't animals evolve to have jet engines?

Closest animal I got is a sand skimmer lizard that evolved to cycle it's legs on an axis like a looney tuness character.

Heard you talkin' shit.

>When you ARE the wheel

Probably because you need some method of propulsion in addition for the wheels to actually be of any use. You can't just rely on gravity and wind forever and when you're stuck you'll need legs anyway to upright yourself.

But I think a better answer is that we never see wheels evolve in nature is simply because wheels don't help at all underwater, while limbs (that would eventually evolve to be strong enough to support the organism on land) do significantly. When you've already evolved legs, there's no way to evolve wheels (assuming it's biomechanically possible at a macro level) without seeing a significant drop in fitness at some point. That's my reasoning as to why you never see wheels in nature.

>When you are the ball

Here you go OP
The only animal known to roll away from predators when threatened.

...

Coincidentially this brings up this guy...

They can also roll down hills in emergencies (however mostly do it on land) and also answers the question holy grail of video game questions;

"How does Samus roll up into a morph ball?"

Genius.

when threatened, the pebble toad can tense up its muscles and roll away from predators

Make the rotating part pourous and lubricate with blood or some oxygen carrying substance

The only possible way for animals to have wheels it's if they evolved somekind of torque-converter-like organ.
Some kind of intermediate step between the body and the wheels, that can spin while supplying fluids to the wheel.
You would need a creature with an insanely strong heart in order to create the pressures that would make the wheel spin,
which compared to legs is incredibly inefficient.

What if you had a colony organism, where the different parts were discreet critters?

I could see a wandering coral reeflet meandering about -- it would not need huge efficiency, since moving slowly to a better spot would be sufficient to be evolutionary beneficial when competing with corals that do not move at all..

This is only a factor if you can choose what you evolve. When you are fueling evolution by random mutation, you take what you are given, and then further random change gives you the opportunity to tweak it. You don;t get to say "Legs will be better, I'm not having with this wheel mutation, I'm waiting for the good legs mutation to come along."

"You" here meaning a species, not an individual.

Well I'll be...

None of the early adaptive steps towards any better system, even legs, are AS adaptive as later iterations.

The first fish to painfully drag his scaly ass onto the beach did not have gazelle-legs for darting here and there.

Cliff Simak had a wheeled species in "The Goblin Reservation."

>that type of snake that holds is own tail and rolls downhill

Hi Grampaw, what's for supper?

Dog eating squid would like a word with you.

>The only animal known to roll away from predators when threatened.

Not only is it not the only, it is not even the first in this thread.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotifer

>doesn't like dirt bikes
Spotted the low test cuck

All the ancestors of the turtle had legs and small claws. As an amphibious reptile that has to move on land and in water it is an advantage to have legs that it can swim with.

If we compare a turtle to a squid we can see that not only do squid live beneath the surface but that ligaments more like a mammal suit the turtle where as softer, flexible and gelatinous arms like that of the squid suit them for catching prey and moving around in the ocean.

Just to quickly explain selection pressure; when a species has traits that give it the ability to survive and spread its genes those characteristics are generally already inherent. If a turtle has a sharp beak and it survives where other less angular beaked turtles die off then later on that gene can begin to become more and more expressed as males and females who both have the gene for angular beaks reproduce with one another. That is made clear by Gregor Mendel's Punnett square, but instead of thinking of it as one square divided into fourths it looks like a gigantic checkerboard with the trait becoming more pronounced farther down the tree of offspring.

To answer your question there effectively was never an option for animals like turtles to have a morphology that had something resembling wheels.

:3

*hugs you*

>The word "rotifer" is derived from a Latin word meaning "wheel-bearer",[12] due to the corona around the mouth that in concerted sequential motion resembles a wheel (though the organ does not actually rotate).
Way to get my hopes up, user.

> In the bdelloids, this plan is further modified, with the upper band splitting into two rotating wheels, raised up on a pedestal projecting from the upper surface of the head.[13]
I thought this was something

Isn't a wheel irreducibly complex meaning it couldn't evolve?
All the difficulties of oxygen supply aside, though a stump can help you locomote more than nothing, how could a half wheel help you locomote?

while wheels may be able to be made out of bone or some other material in theory, there is no viable evolutionary path to wheels.

shows that the function of a wheel can be found in nature, but an organism with multiple wheels would not be able to evolve.

If an organism with multiple wheels did evolve (??) then it would have no way of transferring nutrients to those wheels so they would have to develop before the animal was able to fend for itself, and they wouldn't be able to grow with the animal.

Basically it's not viable to evolve towards a wheel because there is no path towards it, and having wheels would cause problems in development that would probably lead to extinction.

Wheels aint viable

molecular motors can't be upscaled like you're thinking. If systems at that scale could just be blown up to even a mm scale we wouldn't have multicell organisms with muscles, we'd just have giant molecular machines.

Systems like muscles have obvious advantages over molecular motors because they allow for healing, adaptation, and better energy delivery to the cells/machine.

You're a fucking idiot.

but life itself is cyclic

fucking incredible
how about the solution to this problem described in philip pullman's sci fi novels
an animal not unlike an antelope locks its front and back pairs of hooves together in the centres of hard toroidal shaped seed pods that act as wheels
the seed pods are dispersed by the animals and eventually break spreading the seeds, thus the relationship between the animal and plant is symbiotic.
this solves the problem of blood supply and wear and tear. when the wheel becomes damaged the animal gets a new seed pod

lol

a symbiotic relationship would probably be the only possible way it could happen, but that animal would have to be able to move without the wheels and would possibly be at an advantage if it wasn't as defenseless without the pods, which would be pressure towards not using them.

The path to using seed pods is also pretty dubious, I doubt any step towards being able to use the wheels would help the animal survive.

Muscular atrophy would be a problem.

even for a species that have evolved to be compatible with this mode of transport?

youtube.com/watch?v=sAGEOKAG0zw

Why the fuck would you assume a half-wheel as a step towards a wheel?

>while wheels may be able to be made out of bone or some other material in theory, there is no viable evolutionary path to wheels.
>shows that the function of a wheel can be found in nature, but an organism with multiple wheels would not be able to evolve.

I'll take your word for that if you can explain how you are able to fully understand all possible evolutionary paths, and determine which are viable.

>If an organism with multiple wheels did evolve (??) then it would have no way of transferring nutrients to those wheels

Several have been mentioned in this thread.

Irreducible complexity is an argument Creationists use, it seems odd to see people who understand evolution falling on it.

I imagine the use of one set of legs would be more intense than the other.
The animal would probably have an awkward time walking.

I'm sick of the irreducibly complex meme.
Literally anything even close to round can roll.
Wheels aren't hard to make.
You're thinking of a wheel with spokes and axels and all other kinds of unnecessary shit.