incompetent design
This is the first of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial.
If you were a designer tasked with creating a machine for collecting and processing light, the last thing you would come up with is the human eye. Darwin marvelled at the eye as an "organ of extreme perfection", but in this, he was wrong. Aside from the many illusions that can fool them, our eyes have a major structural flaw. In humans and other back-boned animals, the light-sensing cells of the eye - the "photoreceptors" lie at the back of the retina.
In front of these sensors lie several…