Bro myopia is the least stupid part of our eye design problems. Our retinas are built entirely backwards for no other reason besides evolution making a mistake and then duct taping over it too much to fix it later.
If your retina was the right way around (like cephalopod eyes) you would have:
No blind spots
Higher fidelity vision even with the same number of receptors since the nerves and blood vessels wouldn’t interfere like they do now
much lower likelihood of retinal detachment since you could attach it for real in the first place
possibility for better brightness/darkness resolution since blood supply could be greater without affecting light passage
possibility for better resolution because ganglion nerves can be packed more densely without affecting light passage
The ability to regenerate cones and rods because you could, again, ACTUALLY HAVE SUPPORT CELLS WITHOUT BLOCKING LIGHT TO THE RETINA
Our eyes are built in the stupidest way possible.
Another fun fact: retinol is regenerated by your liver. Not your eyes, not some part of your brain, not some organ near your head like your thalamus which could probably get the job done if it tried, your fucking liver. Your eyes taking a while to adjust to the dark has basically nothing to do with your eyes; it’s because of the delay in adjustment by your fucking liver to produce more retinal, dump it into your vascular system and wait for it to hopefully reach your eyes. Why are we built like this?!
Edit: A few comments asked for sources on the relation between dark adaptation and liver vitamin A. So I went looking for sources. It was honestly somewhat difficult to find information, but I was able to find two different case studies showing that night blindness in patients with damaged livers. Specifically these individuals had liver damage that affected their serum Vitamin A levels. And after raising their vitamin A levels, their symptoms improved.
This study details a patient with normal day vision and no other ocular problems besides being unable to see at night.
The patient had a medical history of stage 4 non-alcoholic liver cirrhosis, which led to a malabsorption of vitamin A, as confirmed by the very low vitamin A level in the serum analysis… …Subjective improvement in symptoms, along with better performance on visual field, were noted after initiating oral vitamin A supplementation for 6 months.
This study details a patient with night blindness caused by low levels of vitamin A presumably due to Hepatitis C.
Case description: This case describes a 64-year-old female patient with symptomatic VAD, likely secondary to liver cirrhosis in the setting of Hepatitis C. The patient presented with night blindness and blurry vision. She was successfully managed with direct replacement of Vita-min A.
These studies do show that dark adaptation is dependent on vitamin A produced by the liver, but I’ll be the first to admit it’s not exactly conclusive evidence of my initial claim that the liver must respond to dark conditions increasing retinol concentration in the blood in order for rod cells to function properly in low light conditions. That is a possible explanation for these case studies but not necessarily the only one, so take my last fun fact with a grain of salt.
Another fun fact: retinol is regenerated by your liver. Not your eyes, not some part of your brain, not some organ near your head like your thalamus which could probably get the job done if it tried, your fucking liver. Your eyes taking a while to adjust to the dark has basically nothing to do with your eyes; it’s because of the delay in adjustment by your fucking liver to produce more retinal, dump it into your vascular system and wait for it to hopefully reach your eyes.
This is fascinating, I had no idea that there was another mechanism at play to improve low light vision other than pupil dilation
Or that it got stuck in the figurative basement organ where a silly amount of bio-chemistry is stuck because evolution kinda shrugged a few million years ago.
I’m not OP and I’m not an expert, but I know that the production of rhodopsin requires retinal. Rhodopsin is a light-sensitive protein our eyes use to see in low-light conditions, and is essential for our night vision. Retinal and retinol are not the same thing, but they both come from Vitamin A, and convert into each other during the visual cycle. Which means that a deficiency in Vitamin A = a deficiency in retinol, retinal, and rhodopsin, which in effect leads to night blindness.
But I’d like to know more/get a source for OP’s liver connection. I know most of our retinol is stored in the liver. However, I’m having difficulty verifying their claim that the delay in night vision onset is due to it traveling from the liver to the eyes. From what I can find, the retinol ligand that produces rhodopsin already exists in mammalian eyes (and persists there as part of the aforementioned visual cycle.) So the argument that night vision takes so long because retinol needs to transfer from the liver to the eyes is suspect.
Unfortunately, search engines absolutely suck these days, and almost every article I can find is behind a fucking paywall. So I’m struggling to find information that can either confirm or deny OP’s claim.
OP, please provide a source! Inquiring minds want to know more!
Honestly, it was pretty hard for me to find a source which has made me a little skeptical of my own statements.
I was able to find two case studies in which patients with liver damage that caused them to have low levels of vitamin A exhibited night blindness. Both were treated for vitamin A deficiency and saw symptoms improve.
The strongest evidence of my original claim is the fact that one of the patients had otherwise healthy eyes and vision, only having extreme trouble seeing at night. After receiving treatment for vitamin A deficiency, her night vision improved. This suggests that dark adaptation is dependent on vitamin A in the blood which is regulated by the liver.
However, I’m now somewhat skeptical and curious myself considering these two studies were almost all I could find on this topic. If I have more time I’ll try digging deeper. For now though, I’ve edited my comment with links to the studies.
I was able to find two case studies showing direct links from vitamin A levels (and liver damage) to night blindness. I’ve edited my initial comment with the links to them.
We see that there is different sensory focuses. For instance many animals can smell and hear much better than humans do. Some animals have exceptionally better eyes than humans, but overall humans are very focused on vision.
Now when we look at modern inner city environments and the like. Would you think it to be actually better if our senses, particularly our eyes were that much better and delivering even more input to our brains? We already see many people that are overwhelmed in terms of their sensory input and frankly the ones that aren’t still suffer slowly from living in cities. In terms of where we are now, i don’t think it is too bad that we don’t have hawk eyes.
I live with, work with, and am myself part of, the autistic population. So I gotta agree - sometimes, higher sensitivity is a real detriment.
It’s not fun being light-sensitive. I’ve had days where I’ve worn sunglasses indoors, with the lights off and curtains closed. The vast majority of my days aren’t that bad, thankfully, but it truly sucks when light causes physical eye pain and headaches. I’ve got a great eye for detail (and have been called “eagle eye” throughout my life), which benefits me in a number of ways, but unfortunately it also means I get distracted by things others don’t notice. I can’t just “ignore” a lot of things, and when those distractions impact me disproportionately, I’m left in the frustrating situation of guiding others to see (or hear, or feel) the things that are super obvious to me - it feels like leading a child by the hand.
I’m also sensitive to touch (I can’t stand light touch, but I can detect ticks on my skin before they bite) and have the ability to hear novel speech sounds that modern science claims I should’ve lost the ability to detect decades ago (which, okay, is a cool feature to have. But it contributes to being easily-distracted.) All in all, I’ve never known any other way of experiencing the world, but I do know that most people have difficulty understanding my atypical point of view. Which leads to me preferring the company of fellow spectrumites, and others who understand and accept sensory differences.
The eyes of mammals are designed in a way that they “see less” than for instance certain birds or reptiles.
You call this “fuck up some weird convulted way”, when it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Thereby it is consistent with the way the visual nerve cells are designed and work together with the rest of physics and chemistry. The design is intelligent as it factors in all aspects as part of a coherent complete design. A design far too complex for any human mind to grasp in full.
Basically your question is like asking, why there is no “magic solution” that directly breaks the observable laws of physics. The genius of the design is in not requiring to break the observable laws of physics to achieve the desired outcome.
You say this is “unscientific garbage” when your only alternative explanation is “everything just happened randomly and here we are.” Neither approach, “intelligent design” nor “extremely long chain of random occurrences” can be empirically observed and only argued logically. I find it unscientific to denounce a hypothesis as “unscientific garbage” when it cannot be falsified, while the counter hypothesis cannot be proven.
your only alternative explanation is “everything just happened randomly and here we are.”
Evolution is definitely not random. The mutations that show up are random, but the selection for them is very directed. If the traits give an organism the attributes to survive, it does and will pass those traits on. If not, it doesn’t. Your argument that it’s all random is typical creationist nonsense.
Neither approach, “intelligent design” nor “extremely long chain of random occurrences” can be empirically observed
We’ve observed evolution many many times. From the peppered moth to COVID and the flu, we observe evolution all the time. It’s the underlying science for all biology and none of it makes sense with out it.
Evolution is a theory that has thousands of proven data points to support it being true. And not one of those experiments has come back showing “goddidit”. Intelligent design is unscientific garbage pulled from a book of fairy tales.
You say this is “unscientific garbage” when your only alternative explanation is "everything just happened randomly and here we are
What an absolutely absurd misstatement about what evolution is. If you actually believe this, then you’re doing yourself a massive disservice, and you really need to learn what evolution actually is before attempting to defend something that claims to be an alternative (it’s not). It’s almost insultingly incorrect.
Intelligent Design, literally does not fit the criteria to be considered a scientific theory. That’s not even a biased take, it’s just fact.
and so… the “intelligent designer” is, for some reason, restricted from being able to make human brains capable of withstanding the stress from having improved senses
TIL,Thank you for dumping obscure biological knowledge!
I felt the same when I found out roughly 90-99 % of serotonin (predecessor) is produced by a certain type of gut bacteria. For some reason, finding the research was (is? Haven’t checked for a few years) for some reason non-obvious and difficult.
Now that I think about it, is there a wiki or something where we can share this knowledge? Your artefact would have helped a friend a few years ago…
Did you just see that other post about Cephalopod eye anatomy and write this?
I ask because you have a poor grasp over what evolution actually is when you say things like “evolution made a mistake”. The truth is that our eyes are one of many, many layouts in the animal kingdom, it’s not some binary thing like you’re making it out to be.
I actually came across this for the first time when I was doing research into the visual pathway for the purpose of trying to structure a spiking neural net more closely to human visual processing.
The Wikipedia page mentions cephalopod eyes specifically when talking about the inverted retina of vertebrates.
The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light-sensing cells are in the back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the photosensitive sections of the rods and cones.[5] The ganglion cells, whose axons form the optic nerve, are at the front of the retina; therefore, the optic nerve must cross through the retina en route to the brain. No photoreceptors are in this region, giving rise to the blind spot.[6] In contrast, in the cephalopod retina, the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot.
The Wikipedia page goes on to explain that our inverted retinas could be the result of evolution trying to protect color receptors by limiting their light intake, as it does appear that our glial cells do facilitate concentrating light.
However, the “positive” effects of the glial cells coming before the receptors could almost certainly be implemented in a non-inverted retina. So that’s the evolutionary duct tape I was mentioning.
It would be difficult to flip the retina back around (in fact since it originates as part of the brain we’d kind of have to grow completely different eyes), so that’s not an option for evolution.
However, slight changes to the glial cells and vasculature of the eyes is definitely more possible. So those mutations happen and evolution optimizes them as best it can.
Evolution did well to optimize a poorly structured organ but it’s still a poorly structured organ.
SNNs more closely resemble the function of biological neurons and are perfect for temporally changing inputs. I decided to teach myself rust at the same time I learned about these so I built one from scratch trying to mimic the results of this paper (or rather a follow up paper in which they change the inhibition pattern leading to behavior similar to a self organizing map; I can’t find the link to said paper right now…).
After building that net I had some ideas about how to improve symbol recognition. This lead me down a massive rabbit hole about how vision is processed in the brain and eventually spiraled out to the function and structure of the hippocampus and now back to the neocortex where I’m currently focusing now on mimicking the behavior and structure of cortical minicolumns.
The main benefit of SNNs over ANNs is also a detriment: the neurons are meant to run in parallel. This means it’s blazing fast if you have neuromorphic hardware, but it’s incredibly slow and computationally intense if you try to simulate it on a typical machine with von Neumann architecture.
I’m an engineering student researcher with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.
To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).
Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.
No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.
Normalize doing research for fun!
Edit: changed “engineer” to “engineering student researcher” because a certain person thought I was purposefully misrepresenting the fact I was a student (despite referencing the fact I’m in school in my other comments).
Jsyk in America only “Professional Engineer” is a protected title requiring a certification. You can work as an engineer and have the title of engineer without getting a degree.
I knew several civil engineers in my hometown who were called engineers without having a degree. I think one of them did eventually get his PE certification too after working under a certified PE long enough and taking the tests. (Infrastructure needs a PE sign off before getting built in my state)
In other fields like software engineering you’ll find a lot more people with the title of “engineer” and no certification or degree.
Anyway, point is that I’m sorry if I mislead anyone. I thought it was obvious I’m in school; in the future I’ll try to avoid calling myself an engineer without a qualifier mentioning I’m a student. I think this is the only comment I’ve needed to update for that, hopefully it will stay that way.
Edit: Listen, it’s pretty clear you’re talking out of your ass. You’re an undergrad who has never performed graduate-level research. You’re not an engineer. You don’t understand ocular biology. You just write a lot of bullshit and expect the people you’re talking with to be dazzled by the academic tone.
Graduate, get a job, put in work, then claim to be an engineer. Your behavior is embarrassing.
Necrobumping this because @[email protected] linked to it with a misleading description.
TL;DR: @[email protected] purposefully misrepresented the argument in his link. I didn’t lie nor did he ever prove me wrong, nor was I talking out of my ass in this thread or the other. I share science I think is cool and I find all sorts of science cool even if the research is outside my main field of study. I’ll even admit when my claims are proven wrong or are less certain than I thought (which you can see if you read this full comment section about liver vitamin A).
I’m not “talking out of my ass” in this thread. (Read it btw I mention interesting science) I was doing the research, just like I said, for a personal project on trying to structure a Spiking Neural Net more similarly to human vision, just like I said. This lead me to look into visual processing in the brain and to the structure of the eye since the initial pre-processing of vision actually might start within the retina.
I never mentioned “cuttlefish” but I guess that’s the only cephalopod he thinks of because this was the initial theory of @[email protected].
Did you just see that other post about Cephalopod eye anatomy and write this?
I ask because you have a poor grasp of how evolution actually is when you say “evolution makes a mistake”. The truth is that our eyes are one of many layouts in the animal kingdom, it’s not some binary thing like you’re making it out to be.
This was in response to my casual comment about how evolution fucked up our eyes. Obviously evolution can’t really make mistakes because it isn’t conscious but it is the general consensus that our eyes are “inverted” because by the time it became an issue, the system was too complex to easily flip back around (the recurrent laryngeal nerve is another good example of this kind of “fuck up”).
Also obviously there are more kinds of eyes, I never said there weren’t nor did I mean to imply (or think I even accidentally implied) this was binary. Idk why chloroken got the impression that’s what I was saying…?
Anyway, I actually am (and was) doing graduate level research despite being an undergrad. And guess what: you don’t need to have a degree to learn things or read research papers.
I do not write bullshit for people to “be dazzled by the academic tone” (in fact I’ve heard I write to casually in my papers), I “write bullshit” because science is cool and I want to share what I’ve learned with others. Who cares what field of science it’s in, it’s fascinating no matter what.
Do science. Share what you learn. Tell people like @chloroken who just want to be mad at you to fuck off instead of engaging them like I have lol (good advice if they are being purposefully aggressive but it seems like this specific case may have started as miscommunication so I’ll x it out)
Oh and to defend myself (and actually brag a little haha) as of now I’ve officially prototyped a real, novel, mechatronics system for use in prosthetics and augmented reality systems, and there’s now a paper in the works with my name first. Point is I don’t think it’s wrong to call myself an engineer. Especially to strangers on the internet who don’t need to know whether I’m a grad researcher or working for a company.
Also I’d go into more detail about my research (the federally funded ones not the hobby ones) but @[email protected] seems like the kind of person who’d stalk/doxx me. So I really should be more careful about what I say about my personal life.
Bro myopia is the least stupid part of our eye design problems. Our retinas are built entirely backwards for no other reason besides evolution making a mistake and then duct taping over it too much to fix it later.
If your retina was the right way around (like cephalopod eyes) you would have:
Our eyes are built in the stupidest way possible.
Another fun fact: retinol is regenerated by your liver. Not your eyes, not some part of your brain, not some organ near your head like your thalamus which could probably get the job done if it tried, your fucking liver. Your eyes taking a while to adjust to the dark has basically nothing to do with your eyes; it’s because of the delay in adjustment by your fucking liver to produce more retinal, dump it into your vascular system and wait for it to hopefully reach your eyes. Why are we built like this?!
Edit: A few comments asked for sources on the relation between dark adaptation and liver vitamin A. So I went looking for sources. It was honestly somewhat difficult to find information, but I was able to find two different case studies showing that night blindness in patients with damaged livers. Specifically these individuals had liver damage that affected their serum Vitamin A levels. And after raising their vitamin A levels, their symptoms improved.
This study details a patient with normal day vision and no other ocular problems besides being unable to see at night.
This study details a patient with night blindness caused by low levels of vitamin A presumably due to Hepatitis C.
These studies do show that dark adaptation is dependent on vitamin A produced by the liver, but I’ll be the first to admit it’s not exactly conclusive evidence of my initial claim that the liver must respond to dark conditions increasing retinol concentration in the blood in order for rod cells to function properly in low light conditions. That is a possible explanation for these case studies but not necessarily the only one, so take my last fun fact with a grain of salt.
This is fascinating, I had no idea that there was another mechanism at play to improve low light vision other than pupil dilation
Or that it got stuck in the figurative basement organ where a silly amount of bio-chemistry is stuck because evolution kinda shrugged a few million years ago.
Just one more reaction, bro, I promise, I’m not just making up new organic compounds for fun.
Maybe if we eat more cephalopods, our eyes will turn into their good eyes?
That’s how that works, right?
That’s how you get a certain pissed-off Elder God to wake up from his dark dreaming down in the sunken ruins of R’lyeh…
honestly that seems like the good end of the scenario we’re playing out right now
I’m reading this with my poorly designed eyes right now!
I wish we could use genetics or some interest8ng science to fix this.
I’d be down for some cybernetic eyes with better resolution and a zoom option and shit
Not just eyes.
Also, i wouldn’t consider them “cybernetic”, i’d consider them “improved” or “upgraded”.
Maybe “augmented”?
Who needs augmentation? Let’s just get the organ printer out and update to Mk2 Eyeball.
oh and built in wireless connection so that MaxiEyes Inc. can recommend you products based on what you see at any moment.
Does eye excercises fix myopia?
Source that retinal concentration is related to dark adaptation?
I’m not OP and I’m not an expert, but I know that the production of rhodopsin requires retinal. Rhodopsin is a light-sensitive protein our eyes use to see in low-light conditions, and is essential for our night vision. Retinal and retinol are not the same thing, but they both come from Vitamin A, and convert into each other during the visual cycle. Which means that a deficiency in Vitamin A = a deficiency in retinol, retinal, and rhodopsin, which in effect leads to night blindness.
But I’d like to know more/get a source for OP’s liver connection. I know most of our retinol is stored in the liver. However, I’m having difficulty verifying their claim that the delay in night vision onset is due to it traveling from the liver to the eyes. From what I can find, the retinol ligand that produces rhodopsin already exists in mammalian eyes (and persists there as part of the aforementioned visual cycle.) So the argument that night vision takes so long because retinol needs to transfer from the liver to the eyes is suspect.
Unfortunately, search engines absolutely suck these days, and almost every article I can find is behind a fucking paywall. So I’m struggling to find information that can either confirm or deny OP’s claim.
OP, please provide a source! Inquiring minds want to know more!
Honestly, it was pretty hard for me to find a source which has made me a little skeptical of my own statements.
I was able to find two case studies in which patients with liver damage that caused them to have low levels of vitamin A exhibited night blindness. Both were treated for vitamin A deficiency and saw symptoms improve.
The strongest evidence of my original claim is the fact that one of the patients had otherwise healthy eyes and vision, only having extreme trouble seeing at night. After receiving treatment for vitamin A deficiency, her night vision improved. This suggests that dark adaptation is dependent on vitamin A in the blood which is regulated by the liver.
However, I’m now somewhat skeptical and curious myself considering these two studies were almost all I could find on this topic. If I have more time I’ll try digging deeper. For now though, I’ve edited my comment with links to the studies.
I was able to find two case studies showing direct links from vitamin A levels (and liver damage) to night blindness. I’ve edited my initial comment with the links to them.
From the point of intelligent design:
We see that there is different sensory focuses. For instance many animals can smell and hear much better than humans do. Some animals have exceptionally better eyes than humans, but overall humans are very focused on vision.
Now when we look at modern inner city environments and the like. Would you think it to be actually better if our senses, particularly our eyes were that much better and delivering even more input to our brains? We already see many people that are overwhelmed in terms of their sensory input and frankly the ones that aren’t still suffer slowly from living in cities. In terms of where we are now, i don’t think it is too bad that we don’t have hawk eyes.
I live with, work with, and am myself part of, the autistic population. So I gotta agree - sometimes, higher sensitivity is a real detriment.
It’s not fun being light-sensitive. I’ve had days where I’ve worn sunglasses indoors, with the lights off and curtains closed. The vast majority of my days aren’t that bad, thankfully, but it truly sucks when light causes physical eye pain and headaches. I’ve got a great eye for detail (and have been called “eagle eye” throughout my life), which benefits me in a number of ways, but unfortunately it also means I get distracted by things others don’t notice. I can’t just “ignore” a lot of things, and when those distractions impact me disproportionately, I’m left in the frustrating situation of guiding others to see (or hear, or feel) the things that are super obvious to me - it feels like leading a child by the hand.
I’m also sensitive to touch (I can’t stand light touch, but I can detect ticks on my skin before they bite) and have the ability to hear novel speech sounds that modern science claims I should’ve lost the ability to detect decades ago (which, okay, is a cool feature to have. But it contributes to being easily-distracted.) All in all, I’ve never known any other way of experiencing the world, but I do know that most people have difficulty understanding my atypical point of view. Which leads to me preferring the company of fellow spectrumites, and others who understand and accept sensory differences.
So this intelligent designer decided to fuck our eyes up some weird convoluted way instead of just… making us see less?
I honestly hope you don’t subscribe to this unscientific garbage.
The eyes of mammals are designed in a way that they “see less” than for instance certain birds or reptiles.
You call this “fuck up some weird convulted way”, when it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Thereby it is consistent with the way the visual nerve cells are designed and work together with the rest of physics and chemistry. The design is intelligent as it factors in all aspects as part of a coherent complete design. A design far too complex for any human mind to grasp in full.
Basically your question is like asking, why there is no “magic solution” that directly breaks the observable laws of physics. The genius of the design is in not requiring to break the observable laws of physics to achieve the desired outcome.
You say this is “unscientific garbage” when your only alternative explanation is “everything just happened randomly and here we are.” Neither approach, “intelligent design” nor “extremely long chain of random occurrences” can be empirically observed and only argued logically. I find it unscientific to denounce a hypothesis as “unscientific garbage” when it cannot be falsified, while the counter hypothesis cannot be proven.
Evolution is definitely not random. The mutations that show up are random, but the selection for them is very directed. If the traits give an organism the attributes to survive, it does and will pass those traits on. If not, it doesn’t. Your argument that it’s all random is typical creationist nonsense.
We’ve observed evolution many many times. From the peppered moth to COVID and the flu, we observe evolution all the time. It’s the underlying science for all biology and none of it makes sense with out it.
Evolution is a theory that has thousands of proven data points to support it being true. And not one of those experiments has come back showing “goddidit”. Intelligent design is unscientific garbage pulled from a book of fairy tales.
We can observe evolution. We cannot observe if the steps are purely random.
E.g. if you mix eggs and butter and flour in a specified ratio and put it in an oven, it is not random that a cake evolves in the oven.
What an absolutely absurd misstatement about what evolution is. If you actually believe this, then you’re doing yourself a massive disservice, and you really need to learn what evolution actually is before attempting to defend something that claims to be an alternative (it’s not). It’s almost insultingly incorrect.
Intelligent Design, literally does not fit the criteria to be considered a scientific theory. That’s not even a biased take, it’s just fact.
and so… the “intelligent designer” is, for some reason, restricted from being able to make human brains capable of withstanding the stress from having improved senses
I think you are missing the point that the limits are intended.
Can we have an eye transplant from an octopus please? And while we are at it, can we have a couple of tentacles too?
Nope
what if i promise to use the tentacles for music and not sex? i need at least four more arms to play my instrument properly by myself
Your “instrument,” eh? 😏
It it requires 13 to play properly
edit: 13 people not 13 tentacles
Nope
TIL,Thank you for dumping obscure biological knowledge!
I felt the same when I found out roughly 90-99 % of serotonin (predecessor) is produced by a certain type of gut bacteria. For some reason, finding the research was (is? Haven’t checked for a few years) for some reason non-obvious and difficult.
Now that I think about it, is there a wiki or something where we can share this knowledge? Your artefact would have helped a friend a few years ago…
Dear internet stranger, you are awesome. Thanks for your comment and time :)
Did you just see that other post about Cephalopod eye anatomy and write this?
I ask because you have a poor grasp over what evolution actually is when you say things like “evolution made a mistake”. The truth is that our eyes are one of many, many layouts in the animal kingdom, it’s not some binary thing like you’re making it out to be.
I actually came across this for the first time when I was doing research into the visual pathway for the purpose of trying to structure a spiking neural net more closely to human visual processing.
The Wikipedia page mentions cephalopod eyes specifically when talking about the inverted retina of vertebrates.
The Wikipedia page goes on to explain that our inverted retinas could be the result of evolution trying to protect color receptors by limiting their light intake, as it does appear that our glial cells do facilitate concentrating light.
However, the “positive” effects of the glial cells coming before the receptors could almost certainly be implemented in a non-inverted retina. So that’s the evolutionary duct tape I was mentioning.
It would be difficult to flip the retina back around (in fact since it originates as part of the brain we’d kind of have to grow completely different eyes), so that’s not an option for evolution.
However, slight changes to the glial cells and vasculature of the eyes is definitely more possible. So those mutations happen and evolution optimizes them as best it can.
Evolution did well to optimize a poorly structured organ but it’s still a poorly structured organ.
Can you elaborate on that first paragraph? I’m interested.
SNNs more closely resemble the function of biological neurons and are perfect for temporally changing inputs. I decided to teach myself rust at the same time I learned about these so I built one from scratch trying to mimic the results of this paper (or rather a follow up paper in which they change the inhibition pattern leading to behavior similar to a self organizing map; I can’t find the link to said paper right now…).
After building that net I had some ideas about how to improve symbol recognition. This lead me down a massive rabbit hole about how vision is processed in the brain and eventually spiraled out to the function and structure of the hippocampus and now back to the neocortex where I’m currently focusing now on mimicking the behavior and structure of cortical minicolumns.
The main benefit of SNNs over ANNs is also a detriment: the neurons are meant to run in parallel. This means it’s blazing fast if you have neuromorphic hardware, but it’s incredibly slow and computationally intense if you try to simulate it on a typical machine with von Neumann architecture.
What’s the purpose of this research?
I’m an engineering student researcher with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.
To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).
Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.
No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.
Normalize doing research for fun!
Edit: changed “engineer” to “engineering student researcher” because a certain person thought I was purposefully misrepresenting the fact I was a student (despite referencing the fact I’m in school in my other comments).
Jsyk in America only “Professional Engineer” is a protected title requiring a certification. You can work as an engineer and have the title of engineer without getting a degree.
I knew several civil engineers in my hometown who were called engineers without having a degree. I think one of them did eventually get his PE certification too after working under a certified PE long enough and taking the tests. (Infrastructure needs a PE sign off before getting built in my state)
In other fields like software engineering you’ll find a lot more people with the title of “engineer” and no certification or degree.
Anyway, point is that I’m sorry if I mislead anyone. I thought it was obvious I’m in school; in the future I’ll try to avoid calling myself an engineer without a qualifier mentioning I’m a student. I think this is the only comment I’ve needed to update for that, hopefully it will stay that way.
Are you doing a postdoc? Masters?
Edit: Listen, it’s pretty clear you’re talking out of your ass. You’re an undergrad who has never performed graduate-level research. You’re not an engineer. You don’t understand ocular biology. You just write a lot of bullshit and expect the people you’re talking with to be dazzled by the academic tone.
Graduate, get a job, put in work, then claim to be an engineer. Your behavior is embarrassing.
Necrobumping this because @[email protected] linked to it with a misleading description.
TL;DR: @[email protected] purposefully misrepresented the argument in his link. I didn’t lie nor did he ever prove me wrong, nor was I talking out of my ass in this thread or the other. I share science I think is cool and I find all sorts of science cool even if the research is outside my main field of study. I’ll even admit when my claims are proven wrong or are less certain than I thought (which you can see if you read this full comment section about liver vitamin A).
I’m not “talking out of my ass” in this thread. (Read it btw I mention interesting science) I was doing the research, just like I said, for a personal project on trying to structure a Spiking Neural Net more similarly to human vision, just like I said. This lead me to look into visual processing in the brain and to the structure of the eye since the initial pre-processing of vision actually might start within the retina.
I never mentioned “cuttlefish” but I guess that’s the only cephalopod he thinks of because this was the initial theory of @[email protected].
This was in response to my casual comment about how evolution fucked up our eyes. Obviously evolution can’t really make mistakes because it isn’t conscious but it is the general consensus that our eyes are “inverted” because by the time it became an issue, the system was too complex to easily flip back around (the recurrent laryngeal nerve is another good example of this kind of “fuck up”).
Also obviously there are more kinds of eyes, I never said there weren’t nor did I mean to imply (or think I even accidentally implied) this was binary. Idk why chloroken got the impression that’s what I was saying…?
Anyway, I actually am (and was) doing graduate level research despite being an undergrad. And guess what: you don’t need to have a degree to learn things or read research papers.
I do not write bullshit for people to “be dazzled by the academic tone” (in fact I’ve heard I write to casually in my papers), I “write bullshit” because science is cool and I want to share what I’ve learned with others. Who cares what field of science it’s in, it’s fascinating no matter what.
Do science. Share what you learn.
Tell people like @chloroken who just want to be mad at you to fuck off instead of engaging them like I have lol(good advice if they are being purposefully aggressive but it seems like this specific case may have started as miscommunication so I’ll x it out)Oh and to defend myself (and actually brag a little haha) as of now I’ve officially prototyped a real, novel, mechatronics system for use in prosthetics and augmented reality systems, and there’s now a paper in the works with my name first. Point is I don’t think it’s wrong to call myself an engineer. Especially to strangers on the internet who don’t need to know whether I’m a grad researcher or working for a company.
Also I’d go into more detail about my research (the federally funded ones not the hobby ones) but @[email protected] seems like the kind of person who’d stalk/doxx me. So I really should be more careful about what I say about my personal life.
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