Friday, November 28, 2014

Importance Of The Front Sight As A Navigator

By Ida Dorsey


Without their eyes, most people would be completely lost, they are a means of navigating the world visually and are vitally important for all living organisms. Seeing is essentially, and the eyes have evolved some clever front sight formation methods in order to give humans the best picture of their world. Without this helpful organ, people would truly be in the dark ages.

Eyes are believed by scientists to have evolved at about the same time as the first animals (during the Cambrian explosion) in one species and within a few million years had spread to most of the others. No other sense organ is more common among the animals, probably a measure of the eye's utility. With the eyes usefulness also comes it's vulnerability due to it being constructed of mostly soft tissue.

While evolution has led the human body to evolve different means of protection, these can be separated into three layers: the most outer layer is the skin eyelid that covers the eye and also waters it. The second layer is the membrane that surrounds the soft tissue of the eyeball. And the remaining layer is the cavity made of bone in which the eyeball resides. Such highly developed mechanisms are a clear indication that eyes should be well taken care of.

Scientists have not thus far managed to build a device that will be able to replace the eye, regardless of how simple the process of seeing may seem when looked at first. The initial stages of seeing are, in fact simple, and consist of light detection, but the sophisticated interactions between the eye and the brain follow after, and researchers do not yet understand how these work.

One of the most surprising things you would find if you were to do a survey of sight and sight organs among all the animals is the range of eyes that are out there. There are believed to be more than 10 distinct kinds of eyes existing in nature currently, some having evolved independently of each other. This goes back to the earlier point about the evolutionary utility of sight.

Human eyes can detect color, depth and direction to a reasonable degree, but there are birds that can see in UV. There are also microorganisms that have eyes that do nothing but distinguish light from dark. The mantis shrimp has hyper-spectral vision and probably possesses the most complex color vision system among all animals.

The human eye can easily be compared to a telescope, camera, microscope or other devices that use light focusing. Light first enters the iris, and is immediately focused onto a small patch of light-sensitive cells at the back. The cells transform the photons into neural signals. In order the change the quantity of light entering the eye, the iris changes size.

Things are relatively simple before the light reaches the rods and cones (the light sensitive cells) but afterwards become appreciably more complex and as yet no convincing explanation of how people actually see has been put forward by the scientific community. The eye is a fascinating instrument and more still remains to be known about it. This is one reason why everyone must take every precaution to keep his or hers healthy, imagine losing such a wonderful gift!




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment