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1 - The Evolution of Eyes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2021

By
Dan-Eric Nilsson
Edited by
Andrew Fabian ,
Janet Gibson ,
Mike Sheppard  and
Simone Weyand
With contributions by
Andrew Blake ,
Carolin Crawford ,
Paul Fletcher ,
Sophie Hackford ,
Anya Hurlbert ,
Dan-Eric Nilsson  and
Carlo Rovelli
Andrew Fabian
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Janet Gibson
Affiliation:
Darwin College, Cambridge
Mike Sheppard
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Simone Weyand
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Andrew Blake
Affiliation:
Samsung AI Research Centre
Carolin Crawford
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Paul Fletcher
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Sophie Hackford
Affiliation:
Wired Magazine
Anya Hurlbert
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
Dan-Eric Nilsson
Affiliation:
Lunds Universitet, Sweden
Carlo Rovelli
Affiliation:
International Centre for Theoretical Physics
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Summary

Eyes abound in the animal kingdom. Some are large as basketballs and others are just fractions of a millimetre. Eyes also come in many different types, such as the compound eyes of insects, the mirror eyes of scallops or our own camera-like eyes. Common to all animal eyes is that they serve the same fundamental role of collecting external information for guiding the animal’s behaviour. But behaviours vary tremendously across the animal kingdom, and it turns out this is the key to understanding how eyes evolved. In the lecture we will take a tour from the first animals that could only sense the presence of light, to those that saw the first crude image of the world and finally to animals that use acute vision for interacting with other animals. Amazingly, all these stages of eye evolution still exist in animals living today, and this is how we can unravel the evolution of behaviours that has been the driving force behind eye evolution.

Keywords

evolution eyesoriginal eyesphotoreceptorsciliaryrhabdomericopsinscephalopodsvertebratesinvertebrates
Type
Chapter
Information
Vision , pp. 5 - 32
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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