Computationally Recreating the Cambrian Explosion of Vision
Starting with a single light-detecting cell, our digital creatures face challenges that shaped real eyes over millions of years: navigating the world, discerning food from poison, and evading predators.
Food & Poison Discrimination
Emergence of eyes from single light-sensitive photoreceptors
Our digital creatures evolve different eyes based on survival needs – compound-like eyes for navigation, camera-like eyes for food and poison discrimination.
Why do eyes have lenses?
Our creatures independently discover solut
9 Comments
bloomingkales
Dawkins gave a concise explanation of the evolution of the eye here as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1iwLqM2t0
dangoodmanUT
Glad every video automatically full screened on iOS
IOUnix
This is interesting. If nothing else to just have the visualization of the idea of how eyes evolved from a single light receptor. I've often heard of that in biology but this really makes the idea more tangible.
bglazer
Fun fact about eye evolution, the dark spot you see on a dragonfly’s eye is not a pupil following you, or even a change in the eye itself. You’re actually just looking directly down into the columns of the dragonfly’s eye. They capture light so efficiently that they appear to be black. They’re close to the absolute physical limit for efficiency.
mgnn
Tangential, but the visuals reminded me of the book Vehicles by Braitenberg (https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/5b1c7c36-4582-4962-a89d-…). Although, it's less about evolution and more about complex behaviours from simple systems.
cozzyd
[flagged]
nomilk
This is probably more a physics/CS question than a biological one, but how far off are we from having physics simulators good enough to try the types of experiments MIT did with the eye but for entire organisms? Presuming that will one-day be possible (i.e. the simulation takes earth's physics as inputs, and spits out organisms vaguely similar to those found on earth), then we could presumably enter the physics of exoplanets and find out what their creatures might be like.
fastball
EDIT: went ahead and mirrored their website[1] for the time being while they figure it out.
—
Website seems broken (repo deleted?), had to go here[2] instead.
And here is the paper[3] the website is about.
[1] https://cambrian.pages.dev/
[2] https://eyes.mit.edu/ACI/
[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15001
utkarsh858
I must say that I was expecting that a single light receptor would also have been evolved from something else so that the title would have earned the moniker of 'from scratch'.