The 200 eyes’ complexity is still being unveiled, we are told:
For many years, the physics and optics of the scallop eye posed a perplexing problem. “The main retina in the eye gets almost completely unfocused light because it’s too close to the mirror,” says Dan Speiser, a vision scientist at the University of South Carolina and the senior author of the new study. In other words, any image on the proximal retina would be blurry and out of focus. “That just seems so unreasonable to me,” Speiser says.
The new study sheds some light on this mystery. The researchers found that the scallop pupils are able to open and contract, though their pupillary responses aren’t as quick as our own. A scallop pupil’s diameter changes by about 50 percent at most, and the dilation or contraction can take several minutes. Their eyes don’t have irises like our eyes do, and instead, the cells in the cornea change shape by going from thin and flat to tall and long. These contractions can change the curvature of the cornea itself, opening the possibility that the scallop eye might change shape and respond to light in a way that makes it possible to form crisper images on the proximal retina. Viviane Callier, “What Scallops’ Many Eyes Can Teach Us About the Evolution of Vision” at Smithsonian Magazine
Take a deep breath and keep repeating “It all just happens randomly somehow. The same random way buildings get built and books get written.”
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See also: Science Mag: Scallop’s Eye “Fine-Tuned For Image Formation” (2017)