dan_b wrote:kwackers wrote:Surely bike designs evolve?
I kind of hope Intelligent Design is involved, where bikes are concerned. Though I must admit I've seen some Halfords bikes and wondered just how intelligent ...
That's the beauty of evolution though - it's essentially random! The pressure to be better is in the selection process - and it's here that humans make for poor selectors...
Then again there's always the niche - why do most cheap mountain bikes have rear suspension? They're the very items that could do with spending their mediocre budget on improving what they've got rather than adding extra mechanical complexity to the detriment of the whole.
But it works because the selection pressure allows a niche for poor but techy looking vehicles to 'breed'.
Eventually they'll die out, the only constant tends to be something that is actually good at what it does - the rest is fashion.
Of course some offshoots of the personal transport evolutionary tree are a victim of their own success, the car pretty much killed off the horse and like a lot of successful branches its final population splurge is about to be curtailed by a lack of food...
