Half a gearing system would never work, so any piecemeal ‘evolution’ in that direction would be of no benefit to the organism, and ceteris paribus probably a hindrance, to be selected out.
Systems are only of actual benefit when they are complete and functional. Biology contains millions of different complete, functional, organic and behavioural systems, and zero ‘evolving’ on-the-way-to-being-complete systems.
If Darwinism were true one would expect many thousands of the latter to be observed.
The truth is that Darwinism requires an enormous amount of faith (plus society-wide indoctrination) to subsist. The irony is that those who most believe in it are the kind of people most likely to scorn faith.
This is a standard argument used by anti-evolutionists. It’s based on a false premise. That characteristics need to fulfill the same function from beginning to end. That’s a mistake. What happens is that existing organs are co-opted for a different purpose
It would be the biological equivalent of a hardware reconfiguration and a firmware update. Half a reconfiguration and update aren’t of any use.
To believe that such a thing is not only possible but enormously widespread shows a great deal of faith IMO.
I also fail to see how the co-option hypothesis is truly falsifiable; thus making it more of a background belief than a scientific proposition. One could always carry on believing it if one was determined to. Just like the rest of Darwinism and other ideologies.
An engineer designing gears for use by an organism like this would surely create gears that worked in both directions, to allow forwards or backwards movements, like in a car.
These gears only allow forwards movement. You could make the case that it’s a good example of precisely what you scoffed at – half a gear system
