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The eyes have it
Natural History, June, 2007 by Frank M. Sturtevant
A caption that accompanies Jennifer A. Mather's article on octopuses ["Eight Arms, with Attitude," 2/07] states that the octopus eye "is a remarkable example of convergent evolution [with the vertebrate eye] despite more than 1.2 billion years of independent evolution." But to my knowledge, every animal species examined so far owes the development of its eye to the Pax-6 gene, a gene of remarkable persistence.
Frank M. Sturtevant
Sarasota, Florida
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THE EDITORS REPLY: Frank Sturtevant is correct; we fell into repeating an outdated example of convergent evolution. According to Sean B. Carroll, a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "One of the most surprising discoveries from the study of the evolution of animal development is that all sorts of eyes form under the control of a set of regulatory proteins, including Pax-6, which date to a common ancestor of vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopods that lived at least 550 million years ago."
COPYRIGHT 2007 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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