When Darwin's skeptics attack his theory of evolution, they often focus on the eye. Darwin himself confessed that it was "absurd" to propose that the human eye, an "organ of extreme perfection and complication" evolved through spontaneous mutation and natural selection. But he also reasoned that "if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist" then this difficulty should be overcome. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] have now tackled Darwin's major challenge in an evolutionary study published this week in the journal Science. They have elucidated the evolutionary origin of the human eye.
The mystery of eye evolution