Disadvantages of Wheels
Wheels incur mechanical and other disadvantages in certain environments and situations, which would represent a decreased fitness when compared with limbed locomotion. These disadvantages suggest that, even barring the biological constraints discussed above, the absence of wheels in multicellular life may not, in fact, be the "missed opportunity" of biology that it first seems. On the contrary, given the mechanical disadvantages and restricted usefulness of wheels compared with limbs, the central question can be reversed: not "Why doesn't nature produce wheels?", but rather, "Why don't human vehicles make more use of limbs?" The use of wheels, rather than limbs, in many engineered vehicles can likely be attributed to the complexity of design required to construct and control limbs, rather than to a consistent functional advantage of wheels over limbs.
Read more about this topic: Rolling Animals
Famous quotes containing the words disadvantages of and/or wheels:
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)