Eye on Science

I just love this. My Hawk Eye macro got published in Science, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.

Prof. Fernald from Stanford wrote a fascinating article on a topic that has intrigued scientists for many years – how did divergent species converge in their evolution of eyes – what Darwin called an “organ of extreme perfection.” The physics of light have constrained solutions to collecting and focusing light to eight basic types of optics, seen in this chart (with imaging based on shadows on the left, refraction in the middle, and reflection on the right). Eyes have evolved independently at least 40 times.

Looking back, eyes matter. Image-forming eyes appeared in 6 of the 33 extant metazoan phyla, and these 6 now account for 96% of the known species.

It reminded me of my earlier flickr ramblings on the complexity of birds’ eyes, – with their wider color spectrum and multidimensional color space. Photographers should give a shout out of respect to dem birdies.

And how about the tadpoles rewiring their visual pathways when they become frogs and move from prey to predator.

While on the topic of being awestruck by biology, check out this video for a modern example… a graphic simulation of a white blood cell… starting in the bloodstream, then through the double layer cell wall, to uncover a “cirque du cell” of lipid transport proteins, DNA synthesis, and ribosomes assembling proteins from RNA code strings.