Re-inventing the wheel....or not?

One of the greatest human inventions is the wheel.

And this begs the question: if the wheel is so useful and great, why haven’t nature thought of it before (read evolution), it certainly has enough time to do all the thinking.

Well, the answer may surprise you. Nature had thought of it already.

Enter the bacteria’s flagella! It is a freely rotating piece of tail-like structure that projects from the cell body, use for locomotion. In simple terms, it’s a motor propeller.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagella

Scientist are even studying this to develop and build nano-sized motors.

Anyhow, wheel structures are still not seen in macro organisms. The problem of entangled blood vessels, the need to suspend a freely rotating axial still buffers the greatest innovator. Some also argue that there is really no real edge as the wheel needs complimenting accessories like roads to be truelly effective.

Puts a new light to the phrase “reinventing the wheel”.