[cap-talk] Bee Eyes

[Steve Witham]

>2009/2/2 Steve Witham <sw at tiac.net>
>
>  > I'm pretty sure the gene-activation signal for "form an eye here" is
>  > the same for humans, bees and octopi, erm,
>
>From: Mike Samuel <mikesamuel at gmail.com>
>
>I thought mollusc and vertebrate eyes were a case of convergent evolution.
>  >From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

 From which I quote: "The development of the eye is considered by some
experts to be monophyletic; that is, all modern eyes, varied as they
are, have their origins in a proto-eye believed to have evolved some
540 million years ago."

"Endless Forms Most Beautiful," by Sean B. Carroll, is fifth on my stack
of books to read, but I got a good hit in the index under "Eyeless
gene":

"But when researchers in Walter Gehring's lab isolated the *eyeless*
gene (named because of the loss of eyes in flies mutant for the gene),
they discovered that the fly gene was the counterpart of a gene already
known in humans...

http://tinyurl.com/aniridia (start at the top of the page)

By the lines
    whose optical nerves
    straighten out all the curves
I didn't mean literally that octopus eyes evolved
*from* ours... that's poetic license.  I wonder if there's
a name for that kind of figure of speech.  I wanted to say
"octipal nerves."

  --Steve