Old 01-25-11 | 01:57 PM
  #43  
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rhm
multimodal commuter
 
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Bikes: 1940s Fothergill, 1959 Allegro Special, 1963? Claud Butler Olympic Sprint, Lambert 'Clubman', 1974 Fuji "the Ace", 1976 Holdsworth 650b conversion rando bike, 1983 Trek 720 tourer, 1984 Counterpoint Opus II, 1993 Basso Gap, 2010 Downtube 8h, and...

Originally Posted by RFC
And that's just how evolution works.
I don't think so. The role of mutation in evolution is that individuals (preferably pairs of individuals) have numerous offspring, which retain a large percentage of the genome of the parent(s) except for maybe one minor mutation. That mutation may increase or decrease each offspring's fitness (carefully avoiding the idea of Darwinian fitness, which relates to how many offspring it has). It's really hard for me to apply this idea to what we're talking about here. I can't see any of these wheeled designs as the offspring of its predecessor. In most cases I can't see any evolutionary inheritance at all. Without that, it's impossible to identify whatever mutation may have occurred, and so it's equally impossible to determine whether that mutation increased or decreased the vehicle's fitness.
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