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Answering your questions about life, Earth and the universe

We take your questions about life, Earth and the universe to researchers hunting for answers at the frontiers of knowledge.

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CrowdScience: How did eyes evolve?

Discussion & Talk

GettyImages-1170535570_new crop.jpg

17/09/2021 GMT

How did eyes evolve?

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, How did eyes evolve?

How did evolution produce the clever organs with which you’re reading this?

Pupil, lens retina - your eyes depend on a whole bunch of intricate mechanisms to help you see. But how does the messy, random process of evolution come up with such complexity?

Look into my eyes. What do you see? Pupil, lens, retina… an intricate set of special tissues and mechanisms all working seamlessly together, so that I can see the world around me. Charles Darwin called the eye an ‘organ of extreme perfection’ and he’s not wrong!

But if the eye is so complex and intricate, how did it evolve? One listener, Aloyce from Tanzania, got in touch to pose this difficult question. It’s a question that taxed Darwin himself, but CrowdScience is always up for a challenge!

The problem is that eyes weren’t ever designed - they were cobbled together over millions and millions of years, formed gradually by the tweaks and adaptations of evolution. How do you get from the basic detection of light to the wonderful complexity - and diversity – of visual systems we find throughout the animal kingdom?

CrowdScience sent Marnie Chesterton on an 800 million year journey to trace how the different elements that make up the human eye gradually came into being; from the emergence of the first light-sensitive proteins to crude eye-cups, from deep sea creatures with simple pinhole eyes to the first light-focusing lenses, all the way to the technicolour detail of the present day.

Produced by Ilan Goodman for the BBC World Service.

With contributions from: Dr Adam Rutherford, Dr Megan Porter, Professor Dan Nilsson, Dr Samantha Strong

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

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