Biology 1002B Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Pax6, Irreducible Complexity, Photoreceptor Cell
4 Nov 2014
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Let"s talk about the evolution of colour vision. Eyes are all over the place so arguably they have evolved over 40 different times in everything from insects to octopi. Charles darwin couldn"t really recognize how you could ever develop something so complex as the eye. Irreducible complexity is the idea that the eye didn"t evolve from something that"s simpler. The eye represents a single structure that you can"t reduce to simpler parts, individual genes and proteins that would evolve over time. We can destroy this idea when we looked at the eyespot in chlamy. What"s really cool about the eye is we hit the idea of convergence and homology. It"s really easy when it"s a protein or a gene because you can blast them and inspect the e value. There"s lots of evidence to suggest that the eye had lots of different evolutionary pathways. The kind of eye you get is very different.
