{"id":3015,"date":"2023-06-22T14:59:39","date_gmt":"2023-06-22T18:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-space-telescope-eye-of-the-scallop-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-06-22T14:59:39","modified_gmt":"2023-06-22T18:59:39","slug":"the-space-telescope-eye-of-the-scallop-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-space-telescope-eye-of-the-scallop-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Space Telescope Eye of the Scallop \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cThe Eye altering alters all,\u201d William Blake wrote<\/a> not long before Darwin extolled the eye as the crown jewel of evolution \u2014 an organ of \u201csuch wonderful structure\u201d and \u201cinimitable perfection\u201d that it magnetizes us to the mystery of life itself. In On the Origin of Species<\/em>, he began a section titled \u201cOrgans of Extreme Perfection and Complication\u201d with a love letter to the eye:<\/p>\n

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To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But marvelous as our own human eyes may be, they are far from the crowning curio of the animal kingdom. The honor might belong to a creature much lower on the evolutionary ladder of sentience. (\u201cNever say higher or lower,\u201d Darwin exhorted himself in the margins of a book. \u201cSay more complicated.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The bay scallop (Argopecten irradians<\/em>), older than Homo sapiens<\/em> by some 200 million years, sees with 200 eyes the color of Uranus \u2014 bright blueberries bejeweling the ridges of its rippled shell, each equipped with not one but two retinae, containing threefold as many opsins \u2014 the light-sensitive proteins in photoreceptor cells, tasked with converting light into electrochemical signals \u2014 as ours. <\/p>\n

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