Why is eyesight such a key and simple, yet diverse, feature on animals?
Chapter 9 of Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin moves onto another key feature of the face, from the nose to the eye. The eye has always been a organ of wonders, the way we see things and how different animals do not see colors as clearly as us humans. The way the human eye worked had been long discovered and understood by scientists and researchers, the way it reacts and absorbs light to give us sight. Though all organisms have a light absorbing molecule called opsins, only a few organisms, the ones closely related to human beings, have the three genes for color vision, required for seeing a large range of color.
The most interesting part of this chapter was that eyes have a gene that can be turned on and off. Scientists took this gene in fruit flies and moved it around to different spots of the body, and saw that when the gene was turned on in that specific place, an eye would grow. I found that to be really cool, but quite creepy when actually thinking about it. This chapter is mostly related to Big Idea #1 because it talks about evolution and how the worm found in 2001 had the vision system of both invertebrates and vertebrates.
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