Which ones do you have in mind? Making the argument the other way round seems a lot easier, for instance, wheels and axles weren't inspired by existing biology.
Freely rotating bearing surfaces don't really offer much compatibility with multicellular life. For nutrient/waste transfer or nervous systems to work between an outer body and an axle-like thing would be a big evolutionary step! It's fun to ponder how it might work and whether it could work robustly. We have the same kind of obstacles with machines featuring freely rotating assemblies: tire pressure sensors have to wirelessly communicate. Steering wheels, on the other hand, support wired connectivity thanks to a flexible connection and limited range of motion similar to joints in animals.
So basically it means it can only build by mutualism.
A wheel organism and an axle organism, both feeding independently and somewhat connecting. Maybe male/female like anglefish
It'd be possible to share blood between them and have imperfect seals like with oil and an engine crankcase, but sharing signaling or applying torque would require completely novel methods compared to existing life, as far as my biology knowledge goes.
Wheels and axles did not come from existing biology, unless you are being pedantic. Wheels for locomotion simply was not a viable strategy for evolutionary driven organisms due to their reliance on infrastructure. Why expend valuable energy to build and maintain roads when it helps your competitors? If animals moved with wheels and built roads, the laziest ones benefit the most, and as more and more organisms get lazy, they gotta switch to another method.
I don't think we should worship biology like it's some miracle process with infinite wisdom. It makes sense to look to nature and biology for solutions when the engineering parameters are aligned (see wood, an excellent material that has impressive properties.) Otherwise, a lot of things that we retrospectively attribute to being inspired by nature are merely convergent designs (there aren't many ways to make something aerodynamic, if you would be surprised)
EDIT: I misread your post and I thought you were saying that wheels and axle were from biology. Sorry about that.
The free-rider problem isn't necessarily the dead-knell for biological infrastructure.
Ants and bees build hives after all. Trees build, well, trees.
It's just that for biological systems, it's relatively easier to build legs than wheels. And as you suggest, wheels need more infrastructure to be really useful. So even if you could solve the free-rider problem completely (which you can't), it would still cost biological systems more.
> Ants and bees build hives after all. Trees build, well, trees.
Yeah but those ants or bees are not competitors with each other, neither are cells in a tree. All organism you described have a strong separation between reproductive parts and the ones which build infrastructure.
Similarly to how the cells in your bones and muscles don't reproduce.
This is one of the ways biology can work. And it's not in contradiction to what I wrote. Just the opposite.
Though to go a bit deeper: plenty of other creatures derive advantages (and disadvantages) from trees. But for making the biology work, the advantages to the tree genes just have to outweigh the disadvantages to the tree genes.
Below a certain size, propellers are less efficient. It's a fluid dynamics thing. I learned about this from a colleague flying robots inspired by insects. If you find an article about bee flight dynamics that's not BS (creationists still sometimes try to use bumblebees as an example of divine magic), it may also explain it. The short version is that with a small propeller all the air around it just starts spinning.
This is greatly overstated, though, since the similarity was more structural than anything else. In fact, Volta is just as well known for the much more important demonstration that biological processes were not a pre-condition for electrical generation. From his wikipedia page:
Luigi Galvani, an Italian physicist, discovered something he named, "animal electricity" when two different metals were connected in series with a frog's leg and to one another. Volta realised that the frog's leg served as both a conductor of electricity (what we would now call an electrolyte) and as a detector of electricity. He also understood that the frog's legs were irrelevant to the electric current, which was caused by the two differing metals
Noticing rolling doesn't require anything biological and the leap from that to wheel and axle is huge and not reflected in biological systems. People were making tools for 10s of thousands of years before they got around to wheels.
1) I suggest you look up the fascinating history of the wheel (as we know it so far)! The axel was actually more likely invented for turning wheels (think pottery); and again, humans are very capable of realizing that angular momentum is conserved when they spin (in that situation they are the axel).
2) I’m a little confused by your point. I concede that no organism has evolved to be Cart-like in its movements, but to say that it had no inspiration from biology seems to create a needlessly narrow definition of invention and inspiration.
3) I think the point you’re ultimately making is that people are clever beings and should use logic instead of simple observation. I think a better example there is nuclear physics (because it very strongly supports your point!)
But maybe, as usual, everyone is right/wrong. Contrary to your point, we are constantly finding new biological inspiration for invention (from nano to macro scale!), but to your point, some of the coolest stuff we do could never come out of the biological Monte Carlo simulation we are a part of.
1) No, a rolling thing is not a thing with an axle, no amount of looking things up will change that.
My overall point is that the bulk of human technology is not very strongly inspired by biological systems. We'd certainly like to build machines with some of the neat properties of organisms but until very recently we simply didn't have anything resembling the capability. Most machines are designed in principally different ways - modularity on a different scale, different use of materials to achieve reliability, etc. Wheel and axle is a just one of the most basic examples.
Wheel invented for pottery spinning. Pottery spinning machine very similar to human spinning. Probably inspired by human spinning
Human now has spinning machine. Human sees that when they spin down hill, they move easier. Human tips over pottery wheel.
Why is the above such a hard thing to believe? It’s supported by the archaeological record! You may not like that narrative but what’s the one you have?
And to be critical of the point youre making: there’s only so much chemistry and physics out there and ultimately we are made of biology, so what are you even saying? That we love making symmetrical objects but that has nothing to do with biological symmetry? That we forge metal because we are attracted to shiny things but that has nothing. To do with our obsession with looking at eyeballs? Maybe open your mind a bit?
But our current findings imply that the wheel and axel were invented for pottery turning and someone eventually got the cart thing going sometime after that.
> wheels and axles weren't inspired by existing biology.
That suggests the hypothesis that only universally discovered mechanisms (which does not include the wheel and axles) were inspired by natural phenomena.
It's a very broad inspiration and the ones who most closely hewed to biological systems were some of the least successful - most flying machines don't use active wings with highly variable geometry. The first successful human flying machines didn't have a meaningful biological equivalent at all.
Depending on your perspective, the airplane is not successful until we figure out how to do it sustainably. We may yet have to go back to lighter than air flight, which arguably has precedent if you count aquatic life, i.e. swim bladders.
Unless we start making the sustainability of our technology a success criteria, we'll never achieve it. Many biological systems are different precisely because they are constrained to run within an overall sustainable system.
Maybe human tech ~is cyclically sustainable on a long enough timescale, but I certainly ~hope we're not going mostly to die off and live without technology until the forests grow back and microorganisms in the oceans turn into oil.
Sustainability is not something optimized by natural selection either, all that matters to get a trait adopted by a population is that it provides a reproductive advantage to the individuals with the trait, which has frequently in the past resulted in ecological collapse. The most disastrous and classic example being the first organisms to emit oxygen which at the time was a deadly poison, is assumed to have killed a huge percentage of the species on earth, and could easily have resulted in a genuine full wipe.
We're smart enough that we should be able to avoid anything like that if we put in the work but don't glorify what's natural, we should be looking for our own solutions.
The three-axis control system (in particular the concept of ailerons) developed by the Wright Brothers was inspired by the way birds twist their wings.
The process being that the people who took inspiration from animals died out and gave way to the people who were better able to adapt to changes in modern technology like the propeller and internal combustion engines?