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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

There was an article just a few days ago where they found the "backwards" retina has denser cells on the front side which concentrate red and green wavelengths. Seemed a bit fishy to me, but it suggests that we don't that our eyes are not optimal. Some of the other things listed are suspect AFICT because we just don't know all the influences that led to them. Arteries? Those are ancient in origin and reflect a weird balance between flexibility, getting the blood distributed, and not bleeding to death from injuries.

While I'm sure there is hackery behind all of these, I don't think humans know enough yet to claim we could do better.

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That's just nature making the best it can of a historical accident.

If you were designing the eye from scratch, you'd have the nerves coming out the back like in squid. Then if you wanted something that concentrates the red and green wavelengths, you could put something else in front of the light sensing cells.

You'd end up exactly where you are now, except you'd not have a huge blind spot, and wouldn't have to spend as much brain power compensating for it.

The blind spot is not huge. It's easily compensated for, and it appears the mammalian eye has other attributes that make it work well. We just don't have enough data to understand whether mammalian eyes embedded a major problem that had to be compensated for, or if this design has attributes that make it desirable.

Maybe, but either vertebrates or cephalopods have to have sub optimal design. My money is on the backwards retina being the kludge.

No, neither is required to have a suboptimal design. Why do you think that? Mammals are quite successful.

They can't both be optimal. The probability that both are exactly equally good is so remote as to be ignorable.

Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.

>>They can't both be optimal.

They could both be optimal for their respective uses. Humans don't spend a lot of time on the seafloor, and cephalopods don't spend a lot of time in the open air. Certainly there are other tradeoffs to be made as well.

It's 7.5° high and 5.5° wide. If you don't consider that huge, then that's up to you. But for me, that counts as huge, especially since it's fairly near the middle of vision. That's over half the width of my hand at arms length.

So... this makes a difference in your daily life as a nomad hunter or software engineer how? None at all. You just don't perceive it unless you go out of your way to.

The way you're carrying on it's almost like you were the project manager who delivered the blind spot. It's a feature, not a bug. ;)

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