6 ms·
What if Eye...?
- teekert 2y agoReminds me of Greg Egan's "Permutation City" (1994)'s "Autoverse". Highly recommended book if you like this article.
- thrance 2y agoSeconded, I also deeply recommend "Diaspora", by the same author. It might be a bit more accessible than "Permutation City".
- teekert 2y agoFor as far as any Greg Egan's stuff can be called accessible... I guess in a way you could call a thrilling story with the theme: "What if human observation DIDN'T cause quantum wave function collapse" (Greg Egan: Quarantine) the same as making Quantum Mechanics "accessible" :D Same goes for many of Ted Chiang's stories!
- T-A 2y agoFor a shorter read, there's his "Crystal Nights": https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html
- bloomingkales 2y agoDawkins gave a concise explanation of the evolution of the eye here as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1iwLqM2t0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1iwLqM2t0
- wolfhumble 2y agoHe starts his lecture assuming: "suppose we start with an ancestor who didn't really have an eye at all but just a single sheet of light sensitive cells . . ." This seems like a very basic condition, and that going from 0 to 'just a single sheet of light sensitive cells' is almost nothing. But of course that is not the case. Before that you would need (+++): 1) Photoreceptor Proteins 2) Functional nervous system or signal processing pathways 3) A machinery to translate the absorption of light into an electrical signal 4) A system for coordinating these signal with other parts of the organism . . .
- procaryote 2y agoYou could have 2 - 4 for other sensory cells, like heat or touch, and then be a single mutation away from sensing light. Iirc, some snakes have some heat sensing cells arranged in pits to give them a directional heat sense. If you did that with visible light instead of IR those pits would be what halfway to an eye would look like
- wolfhumble 2y ago> sensory cells, like heat or touch Like light sensitive cells these would need a similar 1 - 4 +++, so the point would really be the same.
- procaryote 2y agoNot at all... If the question is "how could an eye evolve" it's reasonable to start from a baseline of a complex organism that has sensory cells but lack eyes or even light sensitive sensory cells. A cell sensing light can use the same type of nerves etc as other sensory cells, so there is no need to explain how a cell sensing light + a nerve + a central nervous system evolves in one step. If you wonder how a nerve could evolve for example, that is a different question. If you have two cells and they can exchange chemical signals, which is useful in itself, you have the start of a nerve.
- dangoodmanUT 2y agoGlad every video automatically full screened on iOS
- IOUnix 2y agoThis is interesting. If nothing else to just have the visualization of the idea of how eyes evolved from a single light receptor. I've often heard of that in biology but this really makes the idea more tangible.
- bglazer 2y agoFun fact about eye evolution, the dark spot you see on a dragonfly’s eye is not a pupil following you, or even a change in the eye itself. You’re actually just looking directly down into the columns of the dragonfly’s eye. They capture light so efficiently that they appear to be black. They’re close to the absolute physical limit for efficiency.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoSo dragonfly's hit a scaling law?
- kadushka 2y agoNot a scaling law - a law of physics: how efficiently light can be captured by any optical system. Dragonflies capture ~99.7% of incoming light.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoThey capture so strongly, not even light can escape, from behind the Schwarzfly radius.
- bglazer 2y agoAs another commenter mentioned, this is more like a physical limit for efficiency of light capture. However they also follow a scaling law of angular resolution versus diffraction. Smaller lenses means more blur from diffraction but smaller lenses also allow better angular resolution. Many insects with compound eyes follow this scaling law, having ther same (provably optimal) ratio of eye radius to lens size, despite having very different sizes of eyes. William Bialek is a biophysicist who uses this frequently as an example.
- bozhark 2y agobut only dragonfly's also possess the optimum flight capabilities
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- mgnn 2y agoTangential, but the visuals reminded me of the book Vehicles by Braitenberg (https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5b1c7c36-4582-4962-a89d-5bdfbd1a869b https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5b1c7c36-4582-4962-a89d-...). Although, it's less about evolution and more about complex behaviours from simple systems.
- jaetee 2y agoLove this book, thanks for reminding about it here!
- cozzyd 2y ago[flagged]
- nomilk 2y agoThis is probably more a physics/CS question than a biological one, but how far off are we from having physics simulators good enough to try the types of experiments MIT did with the eye but for entire organisms? Presuming that will one-day be possible (i.e. the simulation takes earth's physics as inputs, and spits out organisms vaguely similar to those found on earth), then we could presumably enter the physics of exoplanets and find out what their creatures might be like.
- MVissers 2y agoHah, I'm creating something like this right now as a hobby. Will open source it soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDePFvxj6Po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDePFvxj6Po I think we're quite far off if you want to model full organism complexity. But if you want to answer a research question you can model simpler versions today. Like this research team did around how vision evolves. By the way– As of recently, we were able to model C Elegans (flatworm) in 3D with all neurons and neurotransmitters. It reacted to virtual stimuli just like a real worm (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00738-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00738-w). So single-organisms is already possible. But the evolution of these entities in 3D will take us a bit more time is my guess: Also I'm not a CS person, just an enthusiast.
- bloomingkales 2y agoCan the virtual flatworm’s virtual actions be mapped to the physical sensors of a flatworm in the real world? Can we get the real world’s flatworm to control any part of the virtual one? Can these two things interface yet is the question (virtual to real bidirectional interface), especially since you are suggesting we have a clone of it. If we do this experiment, what does that say about something doing an experiment on humans (humans control humans inside video games). Sounds insane right? Why would we ever do this? Well … we have this perfect digital clone of a flatworm, what else are we going to do? There’s a lot of evidence that humans would absolutely go down this rabbit hole until it’s logical conclusion. One word: Teledildonics Anyway, the flatworm that is born into such an experiment would never know, or it would just be useless to know. :shrugs:
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- fastball 2y agoEDIT: went ahead and mirrored their website[1] for the time being while they figure it out. --- Website seems broken (repo deleted?), had to go here[2] instead. And here is the paper[3] the website is about. [1] https://cambrian.pages.dev/ https://cambrian.pages.dev/ [2] https://eyes.mit.edu/ACI/ https://eyes.mit.edu/ACI/ [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15001 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15001
- utkarsh858 2y agoI must say that I was expecting that a single light receptor would also have been evolved from something else so that the title would have earned the moniker of 'from scratch'.
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- SamBam 2y agoHmmm... From my experience writing Artificial Life simulators in the 90s, there is so much that is dependent on the parameters that the simulation coders write into the models. Yes, if you build a Genetic Algorithm where you start with a photo-sensitive cell, and then you reward agents that are able to navigate a maze, you're going to end up "evolving" agents that use a bunch of photo-sensitive cells like an eye. Has that really told you something about evolution, about life, or about the simulation that you set up?
- wruza 2y agoAbout the latter, obviously. You can't just test it as in physics, so that's all you can have. The proper question (I guess) is, is that knowledge completely useless or may it help with something down the line.
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- nxobject 2y agoI do think it's the third, _but_ I do also think it's different than the kitchen-sink organism simulations that really were just watching a lot of shallowly-programmed behaviors interact with each other. I think of it more of a model than a simiulation - a model that tries to explain a specific real-life phenomenon in as focused and parsimonious way as possible. Here, the takeaway is that the emergence of two different types of eye – compound and camera-like eyes – can be modelled by a set of 3 specific tasks, in combination with a minimal set of anatomical knobs and switches. Then it might actually be _informative_ to compare and contrast the clear evidence from the model, and see how these explanations compare to the less conclusive ones we can draw from the methods of evo-bio. (A good analogy would be to look at how gates, latches, and clocks can alone account for the "emergence" of modern superscalar microarchitectures, without having to resort to modelling the analog madness of pushing high frequencies through physical circuits, for example.)
- westurner 2y agoFrom "An ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotls regrow limbs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912925 : > [ mTOR, Muller glia in Zebrafish, ] From "Reactivating Dormant Cells in the Retina Brings New Hope for Vision Regeneration" (2023) https://neurosciencenews.com/vision-restoration-genetic-23183/ https://neurosciencenews.com/vision-restoration-genetic-2318... : > “What’s interesting is that these Müller cells are known to reactivate and regenerate retina in fish,” she said. “But in mammals, including humans, they don’t normally do so, not after injury or disease. And we don’t yet fully understand why.”
- whatever1 2y agoAre eyes that good at generating signal or our brain is just good at imagining things it does not see?
- bongodongobob 2y agoIt imagines a lot. One of my biggest psychedelic takeaways.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoOptical illusions are a good indicator of this. I would say it compresses alot. Video codecs are good optical illusions too.
- boxed 2y agoThe blind spot is a big one.
- ZaoLahma 2y agoEyes are good at generating the signal or we wouldn't have much use for the vision they do provide us. On a somewhat related note, due to a head injury I suffered now many years ago, I started developing small-ish blind spots "once in a while" that remain anywhere from a few minutes up to a few months. The spots are very noticeable when they first appear, grabbing the attention all the time. The ones that persist long tend to "disappear" when my brain filters out the broken (?) signal of where the blind spot appeared, and the spot mainly becomes noticeable again if it hides or interrupts a known pattern that I'm looking at. It's as if the brain fills the spot with the average color around it (blue sky - blue spot, white wall - white spot etc), which works well for single color surfaces and such but not great for repeating and predictable patterns. And the hiding "lags" which means if I quickly shift between colors then the spot will momentarily be visible as the old color shows up on the new color. So the brain does "imagine" things, but when it does, it isn't perfect.
- dod25 2y agoThis is truly innovative! From the app name to how it works. I'm impressed
- fschuett 2y agoIn order for this to work in real life, you'd have to prove a lot of other invariants: - The mechanism to interpret the light data signal has to be in-step with the evolution of the eye. Getting light data without a brain evolving at the same time to interpret it is evolutionary recessive, i.e. a useless function. I.e. a real evolution would be more like "cat /dev/urandom > output.html", not a controlled ecosystem with a clear penalty-reward system. - In nature, there is no 1:1 "reward / selection function" like in this simulation. In the computer, this "motivation factor" is externally given, so that the next generation is rewarded and selected out, in reality, there is no rule as to what is and isn't "better" or "fitter" or "more attractive to the other gender" (not like CS nerds would know). Sure, an organism can consume food, but beyond a certain point that wouldn't make the organism just "fat", not stronger. So there also need to be environmental mutations happening at the same time, that reinforce "more food = better evolved". - There has to be a way for the animal to be so dominant, that the connection between light data and food can be genetically passed on and will not be associated with bad artifacts (see ChatGPT hallucinations for examples of "accidental bad artifacts in evolution" - and that "evolution" has millions of man-hours, money and R&D behind it). - By the rule of "survival of the fittest", the next generation mutation has to be (in one single step) such a significant improvement over the last one that it won't be selected out again by recessive selection or dilution inside of the gene pool. - The gene has to be active within 150 subsequent generations, without fail, cancer, recession and provide 150 times a dominant advantage, just to get a basic "eye" for 2D navigation with 10 light sensors. The minimum snail eye (pre-Cambrian) has 14.000 cells [1] (and a snail cannot see color). - The real world is a 3D environment, which adds a monumental amount of complexity. Add to it the complexity of depth, color, shape, ... - The mutation(s) have to happen either "at once" or be widespread (otherwise it's going to be like an Albino animal, i.e. some rare neutral mutation). - All of this has to be done in an environment hostile to life in general (i.e. the edge of underwater vulcanoes, some primordial soup burning at several hundred degrees), all elements have to be at the right place, at the same time, etc. And be created out of nothing, of course. While I do agree that it can be helpful for computer vision, computerized "evolution" is just adaptive statistical pattern matching, but it's absolutely nothing like real biology. It would be more realistic to just output "/dev/random > kernel-gen-xxx.iso" and then run it bare-metal, with no lab environment, no operating system, no programming language, no goal function, no selection / reward process, no debugging, etc. Even Darwin had his problems with the eye. The reason I believe in God is not necessarily because I want to, but because evolution (not survival-of-the-fittest, but the "mutation creates information" aspect) requires far more faith and far more dogmas, which cannot be questioned for the sake of science. When I was in 8th grade biology, I took a stone from the schoolyard, put it on the teachers desk and said "alright, so this is a human if we wait 4 billion years". The teacher ignored me, but never told me I'm wrong. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00606433 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00606433
- smusamashah 2y agoBlog post: https://eyes.mit.edu/project/what-if/what-if.html https://eyes.mit.edu/project/what-if/what-if.html
- p0w3n3d 2y agoMy CS teacher in high school had a lesson with us about horseshoe crab's eye, which apparently does not see anything that is larger than the field of view of the eye, allowing it to consume smaller organisms and omitting larger organisms. We used a neural network model in excel for such purposes. He was (and hope he still is!) a great person, who taught me being curious and insightful in the computer science field. Taught me about Donald Knuth, TeX and many more things.
- pinoy420 2y agoDoes not see anything that os larger than the field of view? I can’t conceptualise this. How? Surely this is the same as humans where if you had a big enough uniformly lit object in front of you, you couldn’t “see” it?
- davedx 2y agoImagine if you only see things if you can see their edges. (most eyes do edge detection in the retina before signals hit the visual cortex)
- p0w3n3d 2y agoat least the model we used was behaving like this. It was making objects larger than it visible as a line and smaller visible as a whole (like coloring fill in MS Paint). Objects that fit in the eye were colored and larger were not. However this was a neural network model (shown in excel as a matrix) - I wonder where did he get it from. When I wrote the above, I tried to find it but couldn't
- aryoung1 2y agoAuthor here, happy to answer any questions :)
- tbruckner 2y agoWhat's the goal here? What do you plan on doing with this?
- aryoung1 2y agoWe discuss it at the end of this blog (https://eyes.mit.edu/what-if/ https://eyes.mit.edu/what-if/), but the main future goal would be to discover new types of eyes or vision systems. The results we show on the website generally agree with the conclusions from biologists, but what if we put the animal in an environment not actually feasible in the real world? Like what if we put an animal on a mars-like world, what kind of eyes would it evolve? And if we constrain that animal to only evolve eyes that we can manufacture (like a camera), would it discover a new type of camera or algorithm that's better than what humans have engineered? So here we show an attempt to recreate biological vision, but we're interested in applying it to artificial vision (i.e., computer vision, robotics, etc.).
- 1970-01-01 2y agoMaybe I just can't see the big picture (pun++) but why limit the simulations to the eye? Many other senses are simultaneously working for survival. I'm not aware of anything that just uses the eye for survival. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
- aryoung1 2y agoThat's very true and is also an area of interest. The number of possible animals that can be evolved increases substantially with more parameters, so adding more sensors/types of sensors makes the problem even more difficult. Also our animals are simple balls, where most intelligent animals have arms, legs, so on. So modeling more would definitely be interesting, too!
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- curtisszmania 2y ago[flagged]