Scientists probably cannot design a better duck bill

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Ducks have duck bills. Duck-billed dinosaurs had duckbills. The duck-bill platypus has a duck bill.

All of those creatures eat/ate animals that live in mud under shallow water.

All three of those duckbills evolved independently, yet ended up so much the same that when we found the platypus and dinosaurs we immediately named them duck-bills.

Evolution is a computer. A little slow, but with a staggering number of processes and calculations.

Since it arose at least three times out of trillions of iterated calculations there is little chance that the duck bill is not the perfect design for grabbing creatures in mud and sluicing off most of the mud before swallowing.

I would be interested to see an engineering challenge where engineers were given that set of functional requirements and asked to design the optimal simple mechanism to accomplish the task.

Could anyone beat the duck bill? Don't bet on it.

[Archae]

1. Put it on their bill.

Getting paid for designing stuff is pretty ducky.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Lol

[MilesColtrane]

5. You quack me up.

[Quixote1818]

3. Great post! Very interesting. nt

[Quixote1818]

4. Now that I think of it Evolution only needs to evolve something to a point where the species can

survive. The basic design is probably a good working model and allows ducks etc. to flourish. It wouldn't have to be perfect. So, my guess is that science could probably design a slightly better duck bill. Still, the fact that all these species developed duck bills independently is really amazing and tells a lot about Evolution.

[immoderate]

6. Not so fast. Why would evolution stop with survival?

Ducks with better bills would forage more successfully, live longer, become bigger and stronger. Bill shape might even take on sexual attraction characteristics. All sorts of positive feed back.

What would scientists do? Create computer models? Then conduct tests, and tweak the models to improve the results? And then the reality depends on economy in methods of production.

--imm