Beto Cruz wrote:
> hello, my teacher told me about the eye and physics,
> and how it should be almost impossible to have a
> structure like that developing so perfectly.
>
> care to elucidade what exactly is the point he was
> making, from the perspective of materials science?
The eye is not one entity - there are many eyes, from our sort right through to
compound insect eyes. Eyes are also far from perfect. For example, in mammals
the nerves carrying the signals from the light sensors to the brain run over the
_front_ of those sensors in the way of the light - no engineer would design it
that way. In cephalopods (octopuses etc), by contrast, the nerves run from the
back of the sensors; in other ways their eyes are remarkably similar to ours.
The reasons for these differences is that eyes have evolved independently about
forty times. And the far-from-perfect nature of them is evidence of this:
evolution can get stuck in local optima.
Yours
Adrian
http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensab
http://reprap.org
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