Perception of electromagnetic radiation has proved to be one of the most important abilities of an organism is terms of its evolutionary fitness. It is fascinating to wonder what life would have evolved in lieu of eyes if our universe was different and did not have photons bouncing around everywhere to carry visual information. In a similar vein, it's interesting to think about what the evolution of such a complex organ must have looked like. We know evolution is an extremely gradual process where each successive gene is selected for based off of fitness, so how did something that no doubt took many generations to develop increase fitness before realizing its full capabilities?
annieln
The journey that light takes into the eye to produce the image in our brain involves a lot of different phenomena (e.g. the cornea refracting light, muscles adjusting the shape of the lens to focus light, the inverted image on the retina before the brain converts it back into the brain, etc.) It's impressive how our bodies are able to perform/demonstrate these different mathematical transformations!
Perception of electromagnetic radiation has proved to be one of the most important abilities of an organism is terms of its evolutionary fitness. It is fascinating to wonder what life would have evolved in lieu of eyes if our universe was different and did not have photons bouncing around everywhere to carry visual information. In a similar vein, it's interesting to think about what the evolution of such a complex organ must have looked like. We know evolution is an extremely gradual process where each successive gene is selected for based off of fitness, so how did something that no doubt took many generations to develop increase fitness before realizing its full capabilities?
The journey that light takes into the eye to produce the image in our brain involves a lot of different phenomena (e.g. the cornea refracting light, muscles adjusting the shape of the lens to focus light, the inverted image on the retina before the brain converts it back into the brain, etc.) It's impressive how our bodies are able to perform/demonstrate these different mathematical transformations!