Nature’s Hidden Order Reveals Itself in a Bird’s Eye

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Royal
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Nature’s Hidden Order Reveals Itself in a Bird’s Eye

Post by Royal » Sat Jul 16, 2016 3:36 pm

Nature’s Hidden Order Reveals Itself in a Bird’s Eye

Corbo did know that whatever bird retinas are doing is probably the thing to do. Avian vision works spectacularly well (enabling eagles, for instance, to spot mice from a mile high), and his lab studies the evolutionary adaptations that make this so. Many of these attributes are believed to have been passed down to birds from a lizardlike creature that, 300 million years ago, gave rise to both dinosaurs and proto-mammals. While birds’ ancestors, the dinos, ruled the planetary roost, our mammalian kin scurried around in the dark, fearfully nocturnal and gradually losing color discrimination. Mammals’ cone types dropped to two—a nadir from which we are still clambering back. About 30 million years ago, one of our primate ancestors’ cones split into two—red- and green-detecting—which, together with the existing blue-detecting cone, give us trichromatic vision. But our cones, particularly the newer red and green ones, have a clumpy, scattershot distribution and sample light unevenly.

Bird eyes have had eons longer to optimize. Along with their higher cone count, they achieve a far more regular spacing of the cells. But why, Corbo and colleagues wondered, had evolution not opted for the perfect regularity of a grid or “lattice” distribution of cones? The strange, uncategorizable pattern they observed in the retinas was, in all likelihood, optimizing some unknown set of constraints. What these were, what the pattern was, and how the avian visual system achieved it remained unclear. The biologists did their best to quantify the regularity in the retinas, but this was unfamiliar terrain, and they needed help. In 2012, Corbo contacted Salvatore Torquato, a professor of theoretical chemistry at Princeton University and a renowned expert in a discipline known as “packing.” Packing problems ask about the densest way to pack objects (such as cone cells of five different sizes) in a given number of dimensions (in the case of a retina, two). “I wanted to get at this question of whether such a system was optimally packed,” Corbo said. Intrigued, Torquato ran some algorithms on digital images of the retinal patterns and “was astounded,” Corbo recalled, “to see the same phenomenon occurring in these systems as they’d seen in a lot of inorganic or physical systems.”

http://www.wired.com/2016/07/natures-hi ... birds-eye/


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