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Comment by danidiaz | Hacker News Reader

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danidiaz·

If fake eyes on butts are so useful, why didn't they evolve by themselves?

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Humans bred cows, they did not evolve.

Nature's cows (buffalo etc.) live in very, very large herds for protection.

It seems that no mammal has developed this strategy, at least for defense purposes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_(mimicry)

Darwin had a term for this, selective breeding or artificial selection

Pedantic: cattle (cows be females).

The aurochs didn't really live in large herds. It was just huge and cranky, and had big horns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

It's always nice, if you're going to go around saying "pedantic:", to have what you say afterward be correct.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cow

Something I've wondered about for awhile: why aren't there any animals that have an extra set of functional eyes on their backside? (I don't mean having eyes on either side of the head). Why isn't panoptic vision a thing?

Interesting, I guess the computations are expensive enough that the extra food required isn't worth the survival advantage.

Or not enough time has passed yet. Give it another billion years.

Maybe having eyespots in weird places would deter potential mates? That would be a pretty powerful evolutionary incentive to just not have something that weird back there.

Many animals do. But not all animals evolve the same strategies.

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