Now, we have a clear idea of how the eye evolved, but it’s indeed a very meandering path, and it only led us to a weird fitness optimum where the retina is inside-out.
The paper you linked seems quite old and out of date. The modern view is that the inverted retina, if anything, is a superior design vs the everted retina, but the tradeoffs are complex.
This is all unfortunately caught up in some silly historical “evolution vs creationism” debate, where the inverted retina was key evidence for imperfect design and thus inefficiency of evolution. But we now know that evolution reliably finds pareto optimal designs:
biological cells operate close to the critical Landauer Limit, and thus are pareto-optimal practical nanobots
eyes operate at optical and quantum limits, down to single photon detection
The paper you linked seems quite old and out of date. The modern view is that the inverted retina, if anything, is a superior design vs the everted retina, but the tradeoffs are complex.
This is all unfortunately caught up in some silly historical “evolution vs creationism” debate, where the inverted retina was key evidence for imperfect design and thus inefficiency of evolution. But we now know that evolution reliably finds pareto optimal designs:
biological cells operate close to the critical Landauer Limit, and thus are pareto-optimal practical nanobots
eyes operate at optical and quantum limits, down to single photon detection
the brain operates near various physical limits, and is probably also near pareto-optimal in its design space
That’s interesting, thank you.