Ed Yong
speaker
354 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 Sep
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When you have lots of those clustered together, then not only can you detect where light is coming from, but you now start to have the very rudimentary image, like with very few pixels, but an image nonetheless.
Then you can add an element on top of that, a lens that helps to focus the light to give you extra acuity.
The point is that you can actually very easily see how an eye can build up over time from something that is really unlike an eye at all.
That doesn't take a lot of generations to actually happen.
And we have organisms that have every possible step along the way.
And I think it also... Actually, animals get the kinds of sense organs they need.
And eyes that are, you know, quote-unquote, worse than ours...
exists because their owners don't need to do anything fancier.
An eagle has an incredible eye because an eagle is soaring at great heights and trying to detect rabbits at large distances.
A starfish has a considerably worse eye because a starfish is not doing that.
All a starfish needs to do is to find the shady shelter of a reef and scuttle into some crevice somewhere.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah, so flowers are a great place to start.
So many flowers have evolved to attract animals like bees and hummingbirds and other pollinators.
almost all of which can see ultraviolet.
And if you can see ultraviolet, you can see many signals on flowers that human eyes miss.
So sunflowers, for example, just look yellow to us, but they have this beautiful ultraviolet halo in the middle of them.
Many other flowers have things like this, these like bull's eyes and like landing strips, I think of them as signs that attract pollinators to the flower.
Um...
Birds also, all birds can see ultraviolet to a different extent.
Showing 101–120 of 354 · page 6 of 18
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