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.
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.
"Organic" has an older and still more widely encountered use, roughly, "relating to or derived from living organisms".
"organic" as pertaining to carbon chemistry is chemistry jargon that derived from the general use because of carbon's key role in biology.
"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."
Not sure I understand what you're saying here. My point is that the words he used were used to frame a false dichotomy, and that the use of more precise words for what (I interpret) he was trying to get at would have improved his thought experiment. As I mentioned, I think he raised some good points, regardless of word choice.
As I also mentioned, "mechanical" (literal) and "organic" (literal) do not form a dichotomy; they are not mutually exclusive categories. Surely you would agree here, as you seem to be saying as much.
"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."
Again, see my point about connotation vs. denotation. The IR is roughly when connotations about the word "mechanical" started muddying the waters. (We should note that the ancient Greeks, from whom the word 'mechanics' descends, were certainly prolific engineers in their own right -- but they were careful not to blur the lines the way English has).
At any rate, I brought up this point simply to give the OP some credit, i.e., that I can see how it's easy to use the word "mechanical" to refer to "artificial," given that modern-day connotation is heading in that direction. This was a side point at best, though, and not the focus of my post.
I apologize to you, and to the OP, and to any unfortunate readers of this discussion, for dragging us down what is indeed a rabbit hole.
Very well stated.
Many commenters seemed to think I was asking a question of which of the possibilities was the correct one, and (correctly) answered that the fourth one was correct. This was not my intent, I merely wanted people to reflect on the possibilities and come to their own conclusion.
The chemical engineer points at the vast complexity of enzyme catalysed reactions and intricate supply chains of nutrients.
The electrical engineer observes the networked structure of the nervous system, the myriad signal processing pipelines built all from similar, near-standard components, yet ultimately giving rise to consciousness.
...and the civil engineer gets the blame for routing a hazardous waste pipeline through a recreational area.
http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/07/05/on-design-by-committee/
Engineers think God is an engineer, because He created order out of chaos, and that's what engineers do.
Programmers think God is a programmer, because where do you think the chaos come from in the first place?
This is not a false dichotomy, nor is it a true dichotomy, but a misunderstanding of just what concepts like "mechanical" are.
On the other hand, I don't think I would call the loops that fishing line passes through along the length of a fishing pole "pulleys".
I guess I'd say that block and tackle is not common, and neither are "wheeled pulleys", but "friction pulleys" are.
Alternatively, shoelace eyelets are pulleys ('block and tackle' in fact) , but describing them that way seems odd.
Everything that moves can be considered mechanical.
There is no "mechanical" vs "organic" division. It doesn't even make sense.
Microprocessors (aka, brains) seem pretty straightforward though. Even a little coordination and planning is better than none.
If there was evolutionary pressure to produce an integrated circuit, some form of one would undoubtedly evolve eventually.
Bones and joints basically act as levers and pivots so why can't gear like body parts be found in other lifeforms.
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.
Over time, mutations in those touching pieces interlocked more firmly until they resembled what we think of as gears.
If this were the case, would you not expect to observe these evolutionary steps in other organisms today? As noted in the article:
...there are many jumping insects like the issus... [though] most other bugs synchronize the quick jolt of their leaping legs through friction...
If there are "many jumping" insects, how does it come to be that only a single specie (that we know of, granted) that has evolved this feature, and why have we not observed others undergoing the evolutionary process that could/would yield them in others?
Why? Just because one life form developed a feature doesn't mean that other life forms will have it.
As the article mentioned, there are other solutions to the same problem that other insects evolved. Probably the gears solution is statistically less likely.
Then again, if this was just discovered, how hard have we really been looking?
Because evolution isn't planned, it involves selection from randomly[1]-occuring variations each of which has a extremely low probability. Certainly, we see some some traits that arise independently in different populations in different places with similar traits and are preserved and develop in similar ways, but the fact that a feature that contributes to fitness arises uniquely in one place is far from surprising.
[1] well, really, many of the processes are highly-chaotic more than random, but that's beside the point here.
I grant you all but a feature that contributes to fitness arises uniquely in one place is far from surprising. First, I'm not a biologist and have not studied evolution/evolutionary processes as much as I would like to, but it's hard to agree with that statement. Why exactly is it not surprising? In the over one-million insect species estimated to exist[1], of which some percentage (won't even try to guess) have some evolutionary jumping mechanism, it seems at least mildly surprising that we've never observed at least similarly structured creatures.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect#Distribution_and_diversi...
Its not surprising that some survival-valuable features (especially when they fulfill a function for which there are other mechanisms) arise and are preserved and further developed only once, since them arising in a species in which they are survival-useful is a matter of chance, as is their preservation.
So, its not surprising that features we haven't seen in other species is continue to be discovered. Its remarkable enough to be newsworthy and interesting, but not something that fundamentally challenges the expectations and understandings we have from basic understanding of evolution.
Indeed. In fact, what I find more surprising is that some non-trivial adaptations have developed more than once. Flight for instance evolved four separate times (bugs, birds, bats, and now-extinct pterosaurs all fly[flew], but none of them share a common ancestor that could also fly.) I find that simply remarkable. Really drives home the massive timescales that are involved.
Surely, "now-extinct pterosaurs", not "non-extinct pterosaurs", unless I missed some very newsworthy discovery.
Because:
- the designer is not that clever,
- the designer likes to play with its creatures,
- the designer is not alone,
- the designer forgot to update its creations,
- or simply because she does not care.
Some designed Bengal Tigers, and others designed Aye Ayes.
Being able to jump quicker than your less-able siblings could convey a huge evolutionary advantage. This quickly weeds out the less-able and strongly encourages this kind of structure to develop once the process has started for whatever reason.
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.