Meeting Abstract
The origin of “organs of extreme perfection” has been central to evolutionary debate since Darwin, who famously commented “Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, …. then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.” In 1994, Nilsson and Pelger published a landmark paper that estimated the number of generations it took for a complex camera-type eye to evolve from a patch of light-sensitive cells, suggesting it takes ca. 364,000 generations for an eye to evolve. Given the popularity of eye evolution, we developed a web interface app that enables users to explore the Nilsson and Pelger model and perform sensitivity analyses. Results are visualized by comparing the estimated time it takes to evolve an eye against the fossil record. Our preliminary analyses support Nilsson and Pelger’s results, but a current limitation might be that only the geometry of an isolated eye is taken into account. For more exact estimates of the time required to evolve an eye, the neural circuitry of the eye and other structures crucial to vision should be considered. We conclude that future research on complex organ evolution and the teaching of such complex topics can be enhanced through web interface apps. Such apps are useful because they interactively and visually demonstrate the evolutionary factors that affect model outcomes in a much more accessible way.
