SFNQuestions

Which is exactly the way I wanted it to be interpreted.

No the way it's phrased indicates that the biological arrangement I'm referencing is rare, though it may non exist or be abundant in discrete locations or very specific classes of species. Yeah it's random but not indefinitely so, there are specific reasons why certain traits weren't passed on and why certain traits were, which all vary for different circumstances.

So are you meaning to say that dentin can grow back just fine but enamel seldom does?

I don't need to speak for anyone, it's common knowledge. Also wrong, a simple eye is just the general case that an eye contains a single lens and is extended to any animal, including humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_eye_in_invertebrates "The eyes of humans and large animals, and camera lenses are classed as "simple" because in both cases a single lens"

No, I can't explain it because as far as I know it doesn't exist.

Which is why the title of this topic is "Why aren't there more homogeneous animals?"

That's just the details of the formal definition of an integral, that doesn't really answer anything. No I mean flat out swap, as in the only thing that changes is the summation sign turning into an integral sign and vice versa. The only time I've seen it is when you have the integral of a sum, and then you can switch them, but that's not what I am referring to.

Okay well I have someone saying they can grow back allegedly, and now I have you saying they can't. Is there maybe something you're not clarifying?

Semantics don't circumvent the fact that the consensus of biologists define the compound eyes of a fly differently than the simple eye of a mammal.

The problem is that you don't actually know that nature didn't discover it already. And furthermore, the structure doesn't have to provide all the functionality of an organism like it would in a car, just the homogeneous stiffness.

Is there any practical application for this? The original inspiration for this came from an experimental way to create a "functional average" like for sums exponents representing different characteristics.

So teeth do actually grow to retain their original thickness? But how do the teeth "know" that they've grown enough? What's stopping them from growing indefinitely like rats teeth?

Alright I just want to make sure because I forgot to clarify: this is for the overall atmosphere of Earth and not the entire interior of the Earth, right?

I don't think that's an appropriate analogy because if there was in fact a metal that could withstand heat and was light and was very hard and electrically conductive and economically inexpensive, they would actually manufacture most components out of that substance. There are many many varying circumstances in a car that require specialized substances, and science has yet to discover a material that can address that variance all at once.

Nope, not soft-bodied, intermediate bodied. As I said in the first post, something in between a stiff exoskeleton with a soft inside and a stiff endoskeleton with a soft outside. A reasonable mean between those two would be a moderately rigid/soft organism that has a nearly homogeneous stiffness from the surface to the center. But, I've never heard of an animal like that. I guess maybe cartilaginous fish would qualify for that.

It just always seemed weird how someone could heal after getting a broken bone, but it's somehow impossible to gain any amount of thickness on enamel.

But I mean animals have adapted small amounts of all kinds of different elements and chemicals over time, like how for some reason people need iodine to avoid thyroids. The kind of adaption I'm thinking of is the one where adding a little bit of carbon turns plain old iron into strong steel. I'm sure there's some kind of combination of geometry and an element that would increase the load bearing capacity of a mineralized calcium structure.

Okay I'm just going to say it again cause apparent you didn't see it: compound eyes aren't bad, they're different. They have their own unique advantages.

What's stopping an animal from simply evolving strong enough bones to support a larger weight?

A compound eye isn't horrible, it's just different. Clearly there's a good advantage to it if such an uncommon adaption has survived all these years. You are confusing the effectiveness of a compound eye for a much more general problem of insects that has nothing to do with a compound eye, and that's that insects typically have poor vision to begin with. Not to mention spiders still have eight eyes after all these millions of years. More eyes at once means more field of view and more detail and resolution, but the current mammals and reptiles typically lack it because it would be too inefficient for them to have a giant head full of a hundred eyes.

Not that that's necessarily true, it's not being debated. Maggots are still arthropods and lose their softness as they age, thus they would not fall into something that would be considered a mean of arthropods and mammals. No one is debating that evolution yields a variety of results. In fact, just the opposite, like why hasn't evolution yielded this one specific result as much as these two other results? If the answer is obvious why haven't you answered it? No one is questioning this. Because I'm not a biologist, hence I am posing a question to accredited biologists.

I was wondering why certain bugs seem to be the only animals on the planet that evolved compound eyes, and I'm guessing luck did play a big role in it, but I was also trying to think of where a large non-bug animal would ever need to have that exception kind of resolution and field of view at the expense of a greater complexity of a delicate organ. One possible environment I was thinking is a thriving ecosystem in a constantly snowy arctic environment. In an environment like that with lots of animals around but also lots of irrelevant snow, a predatory animal would need to sort out lots of tiny minute details in a short span of time, distinguishing between the fast-falling snow and animals that camouflaged with it like perhaps a hare, shrew or pika.

Assuming for the moment that sunlight provides all of Earth's energy, how would I figure out the equilibrium temperature given a certain percentage combination of gases? I assume its some kind of exponential solution to a differential equation, but I'm not even sure what to look up.

With today's animals, there will always be some kind of vegetables or fruits that carnivorous can gain nutrition from, but those vegetables/fruits won't always be readily available to them it will take a lot of effort for their system to digest. Even sharks "can" eat fruits vegetables if they're forced to, it is only the case that given their physiology, individuals are much better off relying on eating meat and they have instinctual responses to supplement that lifestyle life responding to blood in the water. And sometimes it's the other way around, like for instance deer can eat meet to supplement their diets when the plants they eat aren't available even though they are more adapted to eating plants than meat. Specifically, dogs can directly digest a much wider variety of vegetables than wolves because they evolved that trait from being domesticated by humans as they followed us from continent to continent.

Well except that by definition they're not equivalent statements at all. One is a specific case of the other's general case. I've proposed three examples so far, but you are fixating on what I already explicitly stated is an exaggeration to avoid answering to a reasonable discussion because you know you are wrong. If life developed under perfect circumstances then competition would never have existed, it would have never evolved into anything. Furthermore, happening to pass through a less than ideal environment is completely different than spending an entire lifetime solely in that environment. Even in the extreme polar bear example, the polar bear has the choice of finding a cool environment to dwell in during the day, but then at night it also has the opportunity to hunt nocturnally when it's very cold using its exceptional sense of smell, and there's plenty of examples of nocturnal animals, or if it's a different desert there might be a snow-covered mountain nearby with its own tundra-like ecosystem. Even if it finds itself in a hostile environment, it can use these things called "limbs" to *move* to a more hospitable environment and just avoid day-time altogether. Humans for instance happen to also live in the arctic tundra, but they still build homes that are warmer than the natural environment. A "wrong" environment is different than a "less than ideal" environment. A "wrong" environment is a polar bear being thrown into a volcano or the vacuum of space. It is completely possible that there are better conditions that those first life forms could have formed in, but they coincidentally had the mechanical/chemical threshold to survive in whatever less-than-ideal environment they formed in, and thus it is possible for populations in less than ideal conditions to have the time to evolve to become optimally adapted to that environment or either willfully/instinctually or coincidentally move to an environment where they wouldn't be gradually killed off if they cannot adapt to their original environment in time to surpass the competition of members that are more optimally adapted to it. Interest isn't what you lost, it's the argument you lost.