Evolution of eyes

The soft-bodied animals that inhabited the world’s seas before the Cambrian explosion (about 541 million years ago) undoubtedly had eyes, probably similar to the pigment-pit eyes of flatworms today. However, there is no fossil evidence to support the presence of eyes in the early soft-bodied creatures. Scientists know that the photopigment rhodopsin existed in the Cambrian Period. Evidence for this comes from modern metazoan phyla, which have genetically related rhodopsins, even though the groups themselves diverged from a common ancestor well before the Cambrian.

By the end of the early Cambrian (roughly 521 million years ago), most, if not all, of the eye types in existence today had already evolved. The need for better eyesight arose because some of the animals in the early Cambrian fauna had turned from grazing to predation. Both predators and prey needed eyes to detect one another. Besides becoming better equipped visually, Cambrian animals developed faster forms of locomotion, and many acquired armoured exoskeletons, which have provided fossil material. Many of the animals in the famous Burgess Shale deposits in British Columbia, Canada, had convex eyes that presumably had a compound structure. The best-preserved compound eyes from the Cambrian Period are found in the trilobites. Trilobite lenses were made of the mineral calcite, which enabled these organisms to fossilize exceptionally well. It is less certain when eyes of the camera-like single-chambered type first evolved. Fossil cephalopod mollusks appeared in the late Cambrian, and they probably had eyes resembling those of their present-day counterparts, such as the lens eyes of Octopus or the pinhole eyes of Nautilus.

The first fish arose in the Ordovician Period (about 485 million to about 444 million years ago) and radiated extensively in the Devonian Period (about 419 million to about 359 million years ago). Fish fossils from these periods have eye sockets, indicating that these fish must have had eyes. The lampreys, present-day relatives of these early fish, have eyes that are very similar to those of other fish, leading to the conclusion that very little has happened to the aquatic form of the vertebrate eye for about 400 million years. The lower chordates, from which the vertebrates arose, have either simple eyespots or no eyes at all; therefore, presumably the vertebrate eye originated with the first fish and not before.

Given the short time that eyes had to evolve in the Cambrian Period (some estimates of the explosive phase of the Cambrian radiation are as short as 20 million years), it is of some interest to know how long it would actually take an eye to evolve. British naturalist Charles Darwin was concerned about the difficulty of evolving an eye because it was “an organ of extreme perfection and complication.” Thus, it might be expected that eye evolution would take a long time. In 1994 Swedish zoologists Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger took up the challenge of “evolving” an eye of the fish type from a patch of photosensitive skin. Using pessimistic estimates of variation, heritability, and selection intensity, Nilsson and Pelger came to the conclusion that it would take 364,000 generations for a fish eye to evolve. Given a generation time of a year, which is typical for moderate-sized animals, a respectable eye could evolve in less than half a million years. Of course, other physiological elements (e.g., competent brains) have to evolve in parallel with eyes. However, at least as far as the eye itself is concerned, very little time is actually required for its evolution.

Another problem concerning the evolution of eyes is the number of times eyes evolved. Given that the fossil record does not contain much information about the eyes of Precambrian animals, scientists have had to rely on evidence from the eyes of living Precambrian descendants to solve this problem. In 1977 Austrian zoologist Luitfried von Salvini-Plawen and American biologist Ernst Mayr examined the eyes and eyespots of representatives of all the main animal phyla and concluded that eyes of a basic kind had arisen independently at least 40 times and possibly as many as 65 times. The evidence presented by Salvini-Plawen and Mayr was of several kinds. At a cellular level, the receptive membrane of the photoreceptors could be elaborated from cilia or from microvilli (fingerlike projections), the eyes could be derived either from epithelium or from nervous tissue, the axons of the receptors could leave from the back of the eye (everse) or from the front of the eye (inverse), and the overall eye design might be of the compound or the single-chambered type. Because these eye features tend to be stable within each phylum, the different combinations of features among phyla were taken to mean that the eyes had evolved independently. Set against this conclusion is the fact that some of the molecules involved in eye construction are indeed similar across phyla. The rhodopsin molecule itself is sufficiently similar among the vertebrates, the arthropods, and the cephalopod mollusks to rely on common ancestry as the most likely explanation for similarity in eye construction. A gene that is associated with eye development, Pax-6 (paired box gene 6), is very similar in insects and mammals, and it also occurs in the eyes of cephalopod mollusks. Thus, the earliest metazoans had at least some of the molecules necessary for producing eyes. These molecules were passed on to the metazoans’ descendants, who used the molecules in different ways to produce eyes of very varying morphology.

Because there are only a limited number of ways that images can be produced, it is not surprising that some of them have been “discovered” more than once. This has led to numerous examples of convergence in the evolutionary history of eyes. The similarity in optical design of the eyes of fish and cephalopod mollusks, such as octopuses and squid, is perhaps the most well-known example, but it is only one of many. The same lens design is also found in several groups of gastropod mollusks, in certain predatory worms (family Alciopidae), and in copepod crustaceans (genus Labidocera). A similar lens structure is also found in the extraordinary intracellular eye of a dinoflagellate protozoan (genus Warnowia). Compound eyes probably evolved independently in the chelicerata (genus Limulus), the trilobites, and the myriapods (genus Scutigera). Compound eyes appear to have evolved once or several times in the crustaceans and insects, in the bivalve mollusks (genus Arca), and in the annelid worms (genus Branchiomma). There are comparatively few cases in which one type of eye has evolved into a different type. However, it is thought that the single-chambered eyes of spiders and scorpions are descended from the compound eyes of earlier chelicerates (e.g., genus Limulus, eurypterids) by a process of reduction. Something similar has occurred in the amphipod crustacean genus Ampelisca, where single-chambered eyes have replaced the compound eyes typical of the group.