Abstract

Charles Darwin appreciated the conceptual difficulty in accepting that an organ as wonderful as the vertebrate eye could have evolved through natural selection. He reasoned that if appropriate gradations could be found that were useful to the animal and were inherited, then the apparent difficulty would be overcome. Here, we review a wide range of findings that capture glimpses of the gradations that appear to have occurred during eye evolution, and provide a scenario for the unseen steps that have led to the emergence of the vertebrate eye.

Author affiliations

1. Australian National University, Division of Neuroscience, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, Garran Road, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2600, Australia.
2. University of Queensland, School of Biomedical Sciences, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia.
3. University of Pennsylvania, F.M. Kirby Center for Molecular Ophthalmology, Stellar-Chance Building, Room 309B, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–6069, USA.

Correspondence to: Trevor D. Lamb¹ Email: Trevor.Lamb@anu.edu.au

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