ArticleVisual neuroscience2013
Eye evolution and its functional basis.
Article in Visual neuroscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers.
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77 citing papers in PubMed, 282 citations in OpenAlex.
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- RECUR: identifying recurrent amino acid substitutions from multiple sequence alignments.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
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- The Effects of Light on Vertebrate Welfare: A Review.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- A genetically tractable non-vertebrate system to study complete camera-type eye regeneration.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Comparative Analysis of Convergent Jellyfish Eyes Reveals Extensive Differences in Expression of Vision-Related Genes.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Bioluminescence and environmental light drive the visual evolution of deep-sea shrimp (Oplophoroidea).Communications biology · 2025Article
- Reduced adult stem cell fate specification led to eye reduction in cave planarians.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Environmental complexity and regularity shape the evolution of cognition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Larval swimming in the sea anemoneEcology and evolution · 2024Article
- Evolution of compound eye morphology underlies differences in vision between closely related Drosophila species.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Characterization of thyrotropin-releasing hormone producing neurons in sea urchin, from larva to juvenile.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Photobehaviours guided by simple photoreceptor systems.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Revisiting Retinal Degeneration Hallmarks: Insights from Molecular Markers and Therapy Perspectives.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
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- Parallel motion vision pathways in the brain of a tropical bee.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Article
- Shell color polymorphism in marine gastropods.Evolutionary applications · 2023Review
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Eye evolution is driven by the evolution of visually guided behavior. Accumulation of gradually more demanding behaviors have continuously increased the performance requirements on the photoreceptor organs. Starting with nondirectional photoreception, I argue for an evolutionary sequence continuing with directional photoreception, low-resolution vision, and finally, high-resolution vision. Calculations of the physical requirements for these four sensory tasks show that they correlate with major innovations in eye evolution and thus work as a relevant classification for a functional analysis of eye evolution. Together with existing molecular and morphological data, the functional analysis suggests that urbilateria had a simple set of rhabdomeric and ciliary receptors used for directional photoreception, and that organ duplications, positional shifts and functional shifts account for the diverse patterns of eyes and photoreceptors seen in extant animals. The analysis also suggests that directional photoreception evolved independently at least twice before the last common ancestor of bilateria and proceeded several times independently to true vision in different bilaterian and cnidarian groups. This scenario is compatible with Pax-gene expression in eye development in the different animal groups. The whole process from the first opsin to high-resolution vision took about 170 million years and was largely completed by the onset of the Cambrian, about 530 million years ago. Evolution from shadow detectors to multiple directional photoreceptors has further led to secondary cases of eye evolution in bivalves, fan worms, and chitons.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.