Backwards question
RCS points to a study that tries to ask why our muscles and bones and motor system always seek maximum efficiency.

For example, when you walk at any given speed, you’ll settle into a cadence – the number of steps you take per minute – that minimizes your energy cost at that speed. It’s a remarkable feat of physiology that invites practical questions: Is there any benefit to learning a new running style, for example, if your body has already figured out its most efficient stride?

Seems like the question is backwards. Laziness or minimum movement is default. Non-living things spend their entire existence non-moving. Among all the phyla of multicellular life, the vast majority spend their lives in one place. Plants, hydra, bryozoans, etc.

The real question is why SOME living things decided to move, why they "waste" energy when they could be holding still on the ocean floor.

I dare you to answer that question without invoking a designer.

After you get past that question, the rest is obvious. Even if we use the standard TED-talk Darwinism, hunter-gatherer and savannah and saber-tooth tiger and so on, the answer to the efficiency question is simple. You survive if you can get away from the saber-tooth tiger. Getting away more than once requires the fastest possible net movement without using up all your stored nutrition. And the fastest net movement, the max distance from the predator's inertial path, requires minimizing the internal stuff. Perfect getaway = use passively stored elastic energy to make one vertical jump. Fleas do it that way. Maximum net move for minimum internal thrashing. Cats sometimes come close to the ideal.

For big hefty critters like us, a single vertical jump won't help. Instead we use legs and/or wings for 3d motion. Alpha and gamma sensors in long muscles sense both stretch and acceleration, and the brain's motor system uses those signals to shape the gait for max net motion.

The "study" then asks:

It’s not clear whether this trait has developed through millennia of evolution, whether we learn these patterns individually as we grow up, or whether we’re constantly learning and relearning them on the fly.

Unnecessary and dumb questions. The alpha-gamma system is all you need. Tuning for best efficiency is AUTOMATIC, given a negative feedback system that senses displacement, velocity and acceleration. No complex brain is needed when you have the sensors. A few integrating and modulating neurons will do. And these sensors already show up in the simplest multi-celled moving animals.

Only one question remains: How did we get the SENSORS? How did they "evolve" by random mutation and selection?

Go ahead. Try. I'm not holding my breath, because that would be inefficient.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 1:39 AM