First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

by zdean • 13 years ago

641 181 13 years ago

teddyh3• 13 years ago

This gives us four possibilities:

1. This geared creature must be considered part mechanical. A cyborg, if you will.

2. A "gear" is no longer (and was never) a "mechanical" device, but instead an organic one. Using gears is no longer (and was maybe never) doing mechanics.

3. Whether something is mechanical or organic depends on the process which created it. This is the "colored bits" or "patent" view. (If I build something using intuition instead of reason, am I no longer doing mechanics?)

4. A gear is no longer (and was never) either mechanic or organic, and is simply a physical process. The whole "mechanical" and "organic" division is a false dichotomy.

andrew_gardener2• 13 years ago

I think option 4 is most accurate.

Bones and joints basically act as levers and pivots so why can't gear like body parts be found in other lifeforms.

igravious• 13 years ago

5. All dichotomies are false dichotomies.

6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution.

brianpgordon• 13 years ago

Creatures with cool adaptations strengthen my faith in evolution. It's creatures like the panda or the koala or the sloth that shake my faith in evolution.

crusso2• 13 years ago

6. Creatures like this shake my faith in evolution.

Why? It's easy to imagine a couple of touching pieces in the ancestor of the issid that aided in synchronizing the jumping mechanics.

Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears. There was pressure on those mutations to proceed toward gears since the gear mechanism is a potentially successful one for achieving the goal of survival through jumping very far, very quickly.

Evolution has yielded some astoundingly more impressive structures. Take a look at this video that explains your own muscle contractions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ309LfHQ3M

The fact that our brains can pattern match the semblance of gears in the issid with gears that we created is a much more impressive development than the gears of the issid themselves.

astrodust3• 13 years ago

Do airplanes shake your "faith" in gravity?

john_b3• 13 years ago

Four. A gear is just a piece of geometry that happens to be useful for a number of practical purposes. Same with rods, rings, and so on. People apply labels to it according to how they perceive it.

wslh• 13 years ago

And what's the limit for such innovation? can microprocessors be developed naturally?

bitwize• 13 years ago

5) Organic creatures have mechanical systems as part of their physiology. "Mechanical" doesn't mean "made of metal", it means "uses movement and friction to achieve some effect". Some mechanical devices, such as levers and swivels, are seen frequently in the animal kingdom; others, such as gears, pulleys, and wheels, are almost never seen in nature. Discovering one of this latter category is a fascinating find.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Pulleys are not that rare. Block and tackle is, but you have pulleys in your hands.

sporkologist• 13 years ago

e.g. Our arms are levers. Bacteria flagella are rotary bearings. Etc.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

Completely agree I was a bit stunned. I've yet to see an organic wheel, many of the things humans discovered already existed in nature (cutting tools, chemicals, fire, ceramics), but the wheel seems to be apart from these.

mikeash3• 13 years ago

5. The concepts of "organic" and "mechanical" are purely human inventions used to conveniently categorize the world, and there is no reason the world has to obey our desire to fit neatly into categories we devise. Any discussion of the meaning of "mechanical" and "organic" is a discussion of language, not of anything outside humanity.

gph• 13 years ago

"The map is not the territory"

Very well stated.

bcgraham• 13 years ago

Isn't this the same as #4?

jlarocco• 13 years ago

Your use of "mechanical" makes no sense. The definition of "mechanical", according to Webster's dictionary is: Pertaining to, governed by, or in accordance with, mechanics, or the laws of motion.

Everything that moves can be considered mechanical.

There is no "mechanical" vs "organic" division. It doesn't even make sense.

cma• 13 years ago

An electric motor, complete with stators, etc. has been known for a while and it didn't change our concept of 'mechanical':

http://www.arn.org/docs/mm/flag_dithani.gif

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

What is this?

sengstrom• 13 years ago

Organic vs. Mechanic is a false dichotomy. There is some latitude in how you define either of those terms, but I think you have to be rather extreme to put them in complete opposition.

jonnathanson2• 13 years ago

There's never been a dichotomy between organic and mechanical. All things that move are mechanical. 'Mechanical' simply refers to motion. 'Organic' is a similarly blurry categorization.

The terms you're looking for are 'natural' and 'artificial,' as in "of nature" and "of artifice (created by man)." These are natural gears, which are so surprising because we'd long assumed the gear itself to be an artificial concept.

Notes:

1) I don't use 'artificial' in the more modern connotation, meaning roughly "fake" or "not genuine." Rather, I use 'artificial' in the original sense of the word, deriving from the Latin artificium, or 'craft.'

2) To be fair, 'mechanical' has increasingly taken on a connotation of artifice or man-make ever since the Industrial Revolution (cf. 'mechanic,' 'mechanism'), but in the truest sense of the word, this is not necessarily the case.

3) My semantical nitpicking aside, I admit you raise some interesting points. I want to acknowledge that.

niels_olson• 13 years ago

All things that move are mechanical.

How is that blurry?

'Organic' is a similarly blurry category

I thought "organic" was restricted to carbon chemistry. Seems pretty specific to me.

The terms you're looking for are 'natural' and 'artificial,'

It may be that his choice of words conflicts with his meaning, or at least conflicts with your interpretation of his meaning, but doesn't make his original word choices less specific in their inherent meaning.

'mechanical' has increasingly taken on a connotation of artifice or man-make

Maybe I'm too far down the rabbit hole, but the Industrial Revolution hadn't even occured to me. There is plenty of mechanical action in the human body, and those have certainly been solids long before Latin came around.

ShellfishMeme• 13 years ago

5. A gear is no longer (and was never) either mechanic or organic, it's simply a pattern for solving a certain type of problem. Humans and evolution both found it, but it's more useful for humans.

dragonwriter7• 13 years ago

5. "mechanical", in the sense used here (roughly, "performing a function involving physical as distinct from (bio)chemical, nuclear, etc., mechanisms") is orthogonal to any sense of the word "organic", plenty of other biologically-produced structures are "mechanical" in teh same sense; its not that there is a false dichotomy at issue, the senses of the words are well-understood to not form a dichotomy at all, though there are other senses of the same words that might be part of something understood (rightly or not) as a dichotomy.

cb18• 13 years ago

lenses

kriro3• 13 years ago

Makes me wonder. Suppose someone holds some sort of gear-patent and it turns out the gear-structure is used by organisms that predate mankind (or are older than the patent at least)...would said patent become null and void due to "prior art" or is it sufficient that the manmade gear lives in another application domain?

rocky11383• 13 years ago

Hmm.. the text wouldn't load for me. Anyone have a copy of the article?

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

Humm ... Try another browser?

natively• 13 years ago

Here you go: https://gist.github.com/natively/6542819

rocky11383• 13 years ago

Thanks!

lifeformed• 13 years ago

It's Ghostery, it killed it somehow. Not sure if it's the site's fault or Ghostery's?

djim• 13 years ago

I just incognito when Ghostery messes up the page view.

benologist2• 13 years ago

Ghostery adds some weird play button you have to click to view the article, not sure what that is but it's new and annoying.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

I wonder how its prevents wear? Could be something quite revolutionary there for the finding. Some sort of new organic lubricant, or something in the gears that self lubricates.

john_b3• 13 years ago

Maybe it doesn't. The last paragraph of the article implies that wear eventually would compromise the gears, but that the insect molting and replacing the old gears with new ones (frequently?) prevents it from being a problem.

npsimons• 13 years ago

Which leads to the classic answer to the age old question of how you make a car last forever: buy three, one to keep, and the other two for parts.

X4• 13 years ago

maybe self-healing? I am curious to know more

andrew_gardener2• 13 years ago

While I can't be certain, I believe it might not handle wear very well based on the article.

Near the end they mention that it molts several times growing new, larger versions of the gears. When its an adult, it actually loses these gears entirely.

Their theory is that when the insect is fully grown is gets rid of the gears since it can no longer molt and thus replace them if they become damaged.

dsuth2• 13 years ago

What's interesting is that their replacement - essentially friction pads, IS expected to last the remainder of their life (and for other similar insects). I would have expected gears to last longer than something relying on friction, especially at those levels of energy.

mason240• 13 years ago

Even stranger is that the issus doesn't keep these gears throughout its life cycle. As the adolescent insect grows, it molts half a dozen times, upgrading its exoskeleton (gears included) for larger and larger versions. But after its final molt into adulthood—poof, the gears are gone. The adult syncs its legs by friction like all the other planthoppers.
Their idea: If one of the gear teeth were to slip and break in an adult, its jumping ability would be hindered forever. With no more molts, it would have no chance to grow more gears.

ruethewhirled• 13 years ago

I found it amusing that to view the 1 second video at the end I had to watch a 30 second advert first

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

Does that mean the patent for the gear is now invalid?

nilved• 13 years ago

No, the issus is obligated to pay royalties.

dekhn2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that the bacterial flagellum is effectively a mechanical gear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_s...

ehsanu1• 13 years ago

More of a motor than a gear.

pygy_4• 13 years ago

No, it converts the proton concentration gradient into mechanical energy.

The ATP synthase also works that way. The ADP and Pi are mechanically squeezed against each other in order to create the covalent bound.

See the last two videos of [0] for the general process. The first three focus on details.

[0] http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/category/slideshows/atpmovies

dekhn2• 13 years ago

"ADP and Pi are mechanically squeezed against each other in order to create the covalent bond."

I have a PhD in Biophysics. If I ever said "ADP and Pi were squeezed together", I'd have been laughed out of journal club. The fine details of the reaction coordinate are still being argued about.

I'll grant you there are no canonical gears as a mechanical engineer would recognize them. I wasn't talking about the motive coupling. But a number of the physical structures (proteins) that couple the anchoring to the moving body have gear like properties. These are used to orient and clock the moving body in its cycle.

OK, I'll up it a notch since you guys are being picky. There are motor proteins which use ATP hydrolysis to do directed (non-random) motion. One of the plausible (IIRC it's passe now) mechanisms involved coupling the ATP hydrolysis free energy to a physical ratchet-like mechanism which, while didn't physically look like a gear when you looked at static crystal structures, seemed to behave like one using various subtle time-resolved mechanisms.

kriro3• 13 years ago

Maybe a little cruel but I'd be interested in some sort of study where a large number of issus' are placed in an environment with a couple of predators.

Repeat this with young and adult versions and see if/how much the gear system (adults don't have it) improves the odds of surviving attacks.

gizmo6862• 13 years ago

What you would be testing is how much of an advantage the young have over the adults. I find it extremely unlikely that the gears are the only difference.

kriro3• 13 years ago

Yes and the gears would be hard to isolate as the lone cause (adults have more experience fighting prey etc.) so maybe you'd have to genetically engineer two groups one with gears and one without.

Either way the hypothesis they gave as to why the gears are eventually mutated away makes sense but has me wondering why they don't keep replacing them instead of settling on living without them.

Thus I'd like to quantify the edge said gears provide as a starting point for the investigation :)

mrb• 13 years ago

Why do they say the gears "look nothing like what you'd find in your car"? They look very similar to me.

ocharles• 13 years ago

To me it appears that there are teeth on one "side" of the gear, but on the back of it is a flat surface. The valley between the teeth is sloped from front to back, going from a deep valley to no valley at all. At least, that was what I took from that picture.

Kliment2• 13 years ago

Just like herringbone gers you find in old sewing machines, designed to self-align in one direction.

mzs• 13 years ago

In fact they look much like spider gears.

jere• 13 years ago

Even stranger is that the issus doesn't keep these gears throughout its life cycle. As the adolescent insect grows, it molts half a dozen times, upgrading its exoskeleton (gears included) for larger and larger versions.

Gotta catch em all.

charlieflowers• 13 years ago

It's kind of like getting your timing belt replaced.

jberryman• 13 years ago

Can someone explain what this means? I don't get it:

Most other bugs synchronize the quick jolt of their leaping legs through friction, using bumpy or grippy surfaces to press the top of their legs together

BrandonY• 13 years ago

I don't know much about biology, but I imagine that if your legs were very lightweight and bumpy, and you pressed them firmly against each other, they would probably stick together pretty well, and so if you tried to move them both in the same direction, but with differing amounts of force, they'd probably stay together and therefore press down in sync.

smoyer• 13 years ago

They "almost" have Velcro between their thighs.

jasonkolb• 13 years ago

So assuming we can one day mimick this feat of engineering, can I look forward to my car literally dying on me in traffic?

ihsw• 13 years ago

This article was posted to reddit, and incidentally the author is a redditor.

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1m9eke/scientists_d...

They're taking questions.

mkmk• 13 years ago

Just to clarify, it looks like the journalist is taking questions, not the author of the paper.

fosap• 13 years ago

I can swear I saw pictures of this years ago. I a series of lectures by different speakers. This can't be a new finding.

yohann305• 13 years ago

In other words, we, human beings, are just reinventing natural occurring (or may have been extinct) mechanics and are putting patents on it.

Okay if you own a patent and sued someone for it, it's time to hand back the money!

electronous• 13 years ago

God is real.

drdaeman• 13 years ago

Unless declared integer.

swamp406• 13 years ago

It is for beauty like this that I believe all living things were originally designed by some intelligence, somewhere.

Perhaps designed to mutate and evolve, or perhaps that was a limitation in the source materials, but there are some beautifully engineered living systems on our planet.

chockablock• 13 years ago

non sequitur. Why does beauty imply the existence of an intelligent designer?

swamp406• 13 years ago

Engineering beauty.

Like a Saturn V rocket, or an AC induction motor.

Things that make you proud to be an engineer.

GravityWell• 13 years ago

It doesn't. In this context, "...that I believe all living things", the words "I believe" can be directly converted to "I have faith without any evidence".

shmageggy• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument

What I was looking for but didn't find in the article was an explanation (or even a hypothesis) for how this mechanism evolved. One of the things I find most fascinating about evolution is how seemingly irreducible complexity in nature always turns out to have a some path of mutations and adaptations that led to the current state. For instance, the canonical example of 18th century teleology, the eye, was touted as being so unimaginably complex that there's the only conceivable explanation for its existence was design, yet today we have a clear picture of how that organ arose from simple photorecptive cells. My guess in this instance? The friction plates that their ancestors have and the other species have got bumpy, then they got more bumpy, then they interleaved.

snowwrestler2• 13 years ago

Evolution is the ultimate proof of the power of agile engineering--ship on a schedule, test with real data, then work on the next iteration, keeping the good and discarding the bad.

emiljbs• 13 years ago

Except that the new iteration is pretty much making random changes.

dsego• 13 years ago

But if the environment suddenly changes you die out.

dsuth2• 13 years ago

You're fitting the data to support your preconceived ideas. That never works out well.

swamp406• 13 years ago

Well, I can't disagree with that.

Slackwise• 13 years ago

Just because something looks "engineered", doesn't mean it is.

A perfect example is the eye. An organ of great complexity, but one that is very easily explained by logical evaluation, as well as existing living creatures and fossils: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E

If you're a software engineer, I hope you understand how procedural systems and algorithms can transform data and functions. Similar processes take place via chemistry and biological interaction. Conway's Game of Life is a good example of a simple system giving rise to complex interaction and patterns.

Complex beauty can arise from the interaction of systems, but if you say to yourself that it "must have been engineered by something greater than me", you settle in your mind, and shortcut around critical thinking and never progress toward understanding. And that's a great, great shame.

swamp406• 13 years ago

I'm a hardware engineer.

I agree with you about patterns and mathematics - also beautiful, but cold (sorry, best I can explain it).

But when we see a complex physical problem, and then see a nicely designed and implemented real-life solution - there I think my "engineered" theory has as good a chance at being correct as does the theory that says it just sprang up from 100 million years of evolution and random mutations (both of which I agree do occur).

pygy_4• 13 years ago

What more, the vertebrate eye has a flaw: its blind spot. The fibers of the optic nerve and the central retinal blood vessels irradiate in front of the retina.

You may think that it is a necessary defect, but the squid eye, which evolved independently to end up almost identical to its vertebrate counterpart doesn't have it. The nerve fibers and blood vessels run behind the retina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_eye

_ls7m• 13 years ago

As a software engineer, when I see an algorithm that transforms and processes data using instructions and symbols, I reasonably assume that someone created that algorithm.

When I'm told the algorithm is really just a random collection of instructions, assembled through an unguided process, that just happens to be work...that strains belief. But even accepting that, I'm still left with instructions, language, symbols, and interpretation. And these can only be produced by intelligence.

Something as simple as the characters we use to write code means nothing unless meaning is ascribed to them, and meaning can't arise from a strictly meaningless process (evolution, chemical interactions, etc). I think the simpler, and truer explanation for why these systems appear engineered, is because they are.

lotsofcows• 13 years ago

Every time you see something ugly, do you change your mind?

m-photonic• 13 years ago

"They're rather specialized, and there are lots of other jumpers that don't have them, so there must be some kind of advantage."

Not necessarily. Evolution has a lot to do with path dependence and in no way guarantees the best of all possible adaptations.

zdean• 13 years ago

Could you clarify/expound on this?

robbiep• 13 years ago

Perhaps the best option would be if you went out and grabbed a copy of 'Climbing mount improbable' - It will answer all your questions on this and then some

jerf3• 13 years ago

Evolution works by incremental changes, each of which to a first approximation must be at least neutral and preferably advantageous to producing offspring. In order for evolution to get from A to B, there must be a path of incremental advantageous changes to get from here to there. It can't magically leap from one optimum to another. So you see things like the way the same basic body plan is reused endlessly in the natural world; with only incremental changes available to create the next species, you can't create a whole new body plan from scratch, even if it would be completely appropriate due to, say, transitioning from land to water. It is also completely goalless; if there is a fantastic two-gene change that a species could make, even if both are individually advantageous, there's no particular force that will cause them to occur [1].

Evolution is both very powerful, with many people underestimating it, and profoundly stupid, with many people also overestimating it. Once humans really get cracking with the gene engineering (which has proved harder than we had initially hoped, but I'm still confident we'll get there), I'm sure we'll find a plethora of relatively simple changes we can make to natural organisms that may involve changing three or four genes simultaneously where no single change is advantageous, which is a thing that evolution essentially can't do.

[1]: Or at least, not yet... one bizarre-ish, "Selfish Gene" way of looking at human gene engineering is evolution evolving itself a way to make those multi-gene changes. Still not in a directed fashion, of course. But evolution will still apply to our own gene engineered creations, just possibly with a very different set of constraints, such as potentially severing the billion-year-old connection between fitness and direct biological reproduction... as I've said on HN before, you don't have to be a full-on "Rapture of the Nerds"-style Singulatarian to see that the future may get very weird....

nialo• 13 years ago

The simple way to see this is that evolution is essentially just the simplest possible hill climbing algorithm (at each step, change one random gene on some fraction of organisms in a random way, keep the best set of genes for the next step).

It can do amazing things, but only because it's had millions/billions of years and an entire planet to run on.

muyuu2• 13 years ago

Almost every complex AND specialized adaptation has an advantage.

In this case it seems pretty obvious that gears can be better than friction at transmitting torque.

thwest• 13 years ago

every complex AND specialized adaptation

The ones that stay around long enough to be studied perhaps.

possibilistic• 13 years ago

I don't think you can really get away with saying that.

I think a better phrasing would be, "the summation of all adaptations in addition to environmental state (including benefits or constraints to itself and all others) has led to the survival in its present environment".

It's really about optimization gradients in a particular time/environmental/social niche. Everything can change with the purturbation of any factor--but that's evolution for you. Adative curve fitting.

javajosh• 13 years ago

Acne in adolescent humans is fairly complex, specialized, and life-cycle limited, like the insect gears, but acne doesn't appear to offer teens any advantage. Acne is just ..collateral from another (beneficial) process. Those gears are probably the same thing.

smosher• 13 years ago

I wonder whether you're responding to the the journalist or the person they're quoting.

If you read the rest of the article, that idea does become more compelling since the creature loses those gears at its final stage in life.

bnegreve2• 13 years ago

Isn't this the advantage?:

Larger animals, whether kangaroos or NBA players, rely on their nervous system to keep their legs in sync when pushing off to jump—using a constant loop of adjustment and feedback. But for the issus, their legs outpace their nervous system. By the time the insect has sent a signal from its legs to its brain and back again, roughly 5 or 6 milliseconds, the launch has long since happened. Instead, the gears, which engage before the jump, let the issus lock its legs together—synchronizing their movements to a precision of 1/300,000 of a second.

samolang• 13 years ago

Did you read the whole article? The article clearly states that the same thing can be accomplished using friction instead of gears (as it is in a bunch of organisms and the adult version of this organism).

drakaal• 13 years ago

The Transformers evolved from naturally occurring gears. It says so in Issue 1 of the comic series.

ThomPete• 13 years ago

I would like to see the patent trolls trumf that.

stcredzero• 13 years ago

In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g's—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand.

This is entirely incorrect. 9g is the limit that someone can stay conscious, but the body can withstand a lot more.

Experimental subject John Stapp withstood 46.2 g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G-force#Horizontal...

ByronT• 13 years ago

I think it depends on the direction of the acceleration. The John Stapp experiment was horizontal acceleration, right? Right above that:

"... if g-forces are not quickly reduced, death can occur. Resistance to "negative" or "downward" g, which drives blood to the head, is much lower. This limit is typically in the −2 to −3 g (about −20 m/s² to −30 m/s²) range."

milkshakes• 13 years ago

relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster

damoncali• 13 years ago

I used to work at NASA on space shuttle launches. My boss at the time had an old (50's? 60's?) era book that detailed the testing on what acceleration would do to a monkey.

I felt bad for the monkey. But yes, direction matters.

JackFr• 13 years ago

Not to mention that the survivable g's are not scale invariant. At the size of an insect it would be easy to survive 400 g's, but at I mile tall, one g would probably kill us.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

OMG - that electron microscope picture, as long as it is genuine, just blows you away. it's a picture of a gear - cogs and teeth and - wow ...

educating• 13 years ago

This is misleading. It looks like a gear, but they are just evolved nodules that caused friction that helped the bug escape predators better. We call it a gear but it is just a mix of physics, life, and death.

noselasd• 13 years ago

If this isn't a gear, then what is a gear ?

mschmo• 13 years ago

Some proteins like ATP synthase kind of act like gears as well: http://www.mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/images/imag...

First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

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