The human body abounds with what, in one sense; we could call imperfections but, in another sense, should be seen as inescapable compromises resulting from our long ancestral history of descent from other kinds of animal. Imperfections are inevitable when ‘back to the drawing board’ is not an option — when improvements can be achieved … Read more
Just as ants and their subterranean fellow-travelers lose their wings underground, so numerous different kinds of animals that live in the depths of dark caves where there is no light have reduced or lost their eyes, and are, as Darwin himself noted, more or less completely blind. The word ‘troglobite’ has been coined for an … Read more
Mutations can be neutral for various reasons. The DNA code is a ‘degenerate code. This is a technical term meaning that some code ‘words’ are exact synonyms of each other. When a gene mutates into one of its synonyms, you might as well not bother to call it a mutation at all. Indeed, it isn’t … Read more
An architect designs a great cathedral. Then, through a hierarchical chain of command, the building operation is broken down into separate departments, which break it down further into sub-departments, and so on until instructions are finally handed out to individual masons, carpenters and glaziers, who go to work until the cathedral is built, looking pretty … Read more
The same is true of most of the flowers we are aware of — probably all the flowers that are colored anything other than green and whose smell is anything more than just vaguely plant-like. Not all the work was done by insects — for some flowers the pollinators that did the initial selective breeding … Read more
Perhaps the most striking feature of the inferior temporal neurons is that many of their preferred shapes closely resemble our letters, symbols, or elementary Chinese characters. Some neurons respond to two superimposed circles forming a figure eight, others react to the conjunction of two bars to form a T, and others prefer an asterisk, a … Read more
Any object projects a very different image on the retina when lit from two different angles or when presented either on the left or on the right of visual fixation. This variability poses a severe challenge to the neural circuits that construct the categories with which we recognize the world. When we need to identify … Read more
Writing—this ingenious art to paint words and speech for the eyes. GFORGES DE It RF BREUF (French poet, 1617-1661) When he paid a visit to Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, Augustine observed a phenomenon that he judged strange enough to be worth noting in his memoirs: When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and … Read more
One may wonder why English sticks to such a complicated spelling system. Indeed, Italians do not meet with the same problems. Their spelling is transparent: every letter maps onto a single phoneme, with virtually no exceptions. As a result, it only takes a few months to learn to read. This gives Italians an enormous advantage: … Read more
The tale of reading begins when the retina receives photons reflected off the written page. But the retina is not a homogeneous sensor. Only its central part, called the fovea, is dense in high-resolution cells sensitive to incoming light, while the rest of the retina has a coarser resolution. The fovea, which occupies about 15 … Read more
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