[extropy-chat] why the vertebrate eye might not be suboptimal after all

[Russell Wallace]

On 7/8/06, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> As far as hawks go, however, your belief is false.
> Hawks and other diurnal raptors have both excellent
> distance vision and incredible accomodation. Their
> lens can change shape much quicker than ours can to
> track prey close up as well.


Fair enough, I stand corrected on that one.

Hawk eyes do however have their tradeoffs as well.
> They are incredibly large. If you look at a hawk's
> small areodynamic skull, it is almost all eyesocket
> leaving room for only a tiny brain.


Makes sense.

I am unaware of any actual data on this subject but I
> would be willing to bet that hunter gatherers have a
> higher average visual acuity and smaller variance.
> Just my gut feelings as a biologist. :)


As a non-biologist, that would be my suspicion too :)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060708/57c28678/attachment.html>