Special issue on Evolution of eyes

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10 December 2008 No Comment

Special issue on Evolution of eyes

A special issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach, dealing with the evolution of eyes is available free online.The journal Evolution: Education and Outreach completes one year now and decided to come out with a special issue on eye evolution to celebrate a milestone completing Volume 1 in their first year of publication!The special issue is edited by T. Ryan Gregory, who also wrote the Introduction to the issue.

The eye is a complex organ that detects light from the surroundings and enable vision in metazoans. Although eyes have always been a talking point in disagreements regarding evolution and most common sentence quoted by creationists is of Charles Darwin from 1802 where he wrote, in his Origin of Species, that the evolution of the eye by natural selection at first glance seemed “absurd in the highest possible degree”.

“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”

But they fail to read the next few sentences of the great man

“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”

The precise mechanism by which complex structures like eye carry out their roles seemed inexplicable, and no alternative but divine creation could be seriously proposed to account for their origin.But thanks to the immense effort put on by various scientists and their students/staff ,helped us understanding a great deal about the form, function, diversity, and origin of eyes.Today we have a lot of tools ( genetics ,molecular etc) to know more precisely the mechanism of eye function and for that matter any other complex organ ,which was unthinkable few decades ago.According to Ryan Gregory this special issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is a celebration of these achievements.

Here are the table of contents of the issue with links to the PDF’s.

Evolution: Education and Outreach
Volume 1 Issue 4

Editorial

351. Editorial by Gregory Eldredge and Niles Eldredge (PDF)

352-354. Introduction by T. Ryan Gregory (PDF)

355-357. Casting an Eye on Complexity by Niles Eldredge (PDF)

Original science / evolution reviews

358-389. The Evolution of Complex Organs by T. Ryan Gregory (PDF)
(Blog: Genomicron)

390-402. Opening the “Black Box”: The Genetic and Biochemical Basis of Eye Evolution by Todd H. Oakley and M. Sabrina Pankey (PDF)
(Blog: Evolutionary Novelties)

403-414. A Genetic Perspective on Eye Evolution: Gene Sharing, Convergence and Parallelism by Joram Piatigorsky (PDF)

415-426. The Origin of the Vertebrate Eye by Trevor D. Lamb, Edward N. Pugh, Jr., and Shaun P. Collin (PDF)

427-438. Early Evolution of the Vertebrate Eye—Fossil Evidence by Gavin C. Young (PDF)

439-447. Charting Evolution’s Trajectory: Using Molluscan Eye Diversity to Understand Parallel and Convergent Evolution by Jeanne M. Serb and Douglas J. Eernisse (PDF)