Evolution - from bicycle to spacecraft ?

Question

A bicycle has wheels with spokes. So does a scooter, motorbike, car, truck. An aircraft, apart from wheels, has wings too. Are mutation and natural selection the causes of this 'evolution' ?

Answer 1

evelutions a bunch of bull, its all fake.

Answer 2

Sort of.  You're right in that mutation is the driving force behind evolution, and selection the "proofreading."  The analogy would work if each technology was a slight modification of the previous one, with the "fitness" being the machine's efficiency and effectiveness, and the selective pressure being the market.  It doesn't really work, though, since the motorbike came after the car.  Plus, all of these things were intelligently designed, unlike life.

It's difficult to work with this kind of analogy, mostly because the items you mentioned are man-made.  One whole line of the Creationists' shoddy reasoning is that life looks designed, therefore it *was* designed.

As an analogy, I prefer the "monkeys at typewriters" one.  Unfortunately, it gets twisted around by the Creationists all the time.  They like to say that a thousand monkeys at typewriters could *never* come up with Hamlet, and they're right... but only because they neglect natural selection.  Instead, imagine a thousand monkeys at typewriters, with a thousand proofreaders sitting behind them.  It's not hard to believe that a monkey could, at some point, type a real word.  So, every time a monkey comes up with a word, the proofreader grabs the paper and puts it up on the wall.  

After a while, one monkey happens to type "To."  Not impossible.  The proofreader grabs it and puts it up on the wall.  A while later, another monkey manages, at random, to type "be."  Up on the wall it goes.  And so on and so forth.  Some of the words would take a a lot of random key pressing, like "question," but it could still conceivably happen.  Take a looooong time of this trial-and-error combined with selection, and eventually you'd end up with Hamlet.

Of course, this example is a little flawed, since evolution doesn't follow a pre-determined route - in other words, Hamlet has already been written.  It is easy to imagine the proofreaders simply following grammatical rules, though, and working with the words they find, resulting in a rambling, free-flowing story.

Answer 3

No, this is not evolution ... for several reasons:

1. There is no order you can put the vehicles according to features that would be consistent with a "progression."   E.g. a bicycle and a motorcycle both have spokes in their wheels, but a scooter does not.   So a scooter does not fall "in between" bikes and motorbikes.

2. The "paleontological" evidence also does not show a sequence.  E.g. we know that automobiles appeared in the historical record before motorbikes ... so they could not have "descended" from them.

3. The big one.  These objects do not *reproduce*.   So they cannot be "ancestors" or "descendants" of each other because, by definition, they do not have "ancestors" or "descendants" at all.  

Now, if you recognize that the process of design itself involves a kind of reproduction ... as in designers of vehicles looking at the design of other vehicles and "replicating them with improvements", then you could make a case of "evolution".   For example, you could say that the 1988 Camaro "evolved" from the 1987 Camaro because we see (a) progression; (b) time sequence (we know that the '87 appeared before the '88 in the historical record); and (c) reproduction (Camaro designers replicating earlier designs, and improving on them).

Answer 4

Not quite.  It is evolution of engineering designs of vehicles, but it isn't really analogous to biological evolution.  

If the bicycles reproduces with variation on their own, then it would be a good comparison.  Instead humans fill this role by improving designs.

Answer 5

No, of course not.  

Mutations and natural selection are not responsible for that nor other complex things. There are similarities, but those similarities only go as far as functional needs or esthetic wants. Scientists always try to put things in the order of their evolutionary presumptions. As you can see this can be done with any set of similar items. Knives, spoons, sporks, forks.   Simple eyes to complex eyes. Dinosaurs to hummingbirds. Wait, that last one seems a little far fetched. What we see are gross oversimplifications when it comes to this kind of ordering. Yes there are similarities between a bike frame and a scooter frame but when you break it down to the level of DNA, the level of difference is huge. The total # of possible differences between a bike frame and a Scooter frame would have to be taken into calculation and then randomly drawn from. Even the weird ones that would totally move it in the wrong direction, including what it was made from. I.E. My body could try making my heart out of bone or my knee cap out of stomach lining. It could put snakes venom in for my breast milk. You see the differences are so huge that I don't think that a person could ever calculate the odds on it in a totally randomly changing system. Once you even began to start to get one complicated thing right the same changing system (mutations) would start to wreck another. The body is so complicated that you could never hold it all together. And the math is not even close to say that given enough time and generations you could get one to change and live. If you want to line up visual similarities to see how a dinosaur changed into a bird and line up some that got a little bigger or some other minor lineage, the changing wouldn't stop just where you want it to. If was random it would change EVERY other system in the body and in EVERY possible way. There is no system that could manage this destructive activity. That is why we see most animals not changing. The may have a little pre-programmed variation, they may have a lot of pre-programmed variation. But they don't just randomly mutate.

Answer 6

Nature didn't make those things. They were conceived and created by human minds, building from current thoughts and past accomplishments. The mind didn't evolve during this period; it added to its base of acquired knowledge.

Answer 7

Neither. This is intelligent design.

Answer 8

i would say so. the things that worked good went on to be made better, and things that didnt work died out. the bicycle was made with spokes, then people said, oh, if i put a motor on that, it would be cooler, and since that worked, people did more and more to it to make it better. kinda how it works.

make it a good day