Take An Extremely Close Up Look at the Human Eye

No, these aren’t new HUBBLE photographs – they’re extremely detailed photographs of the human eye, shot by photographer Suren Manvelyan. Pretty freaking cool. And in case y’all didnt know:

The common origin… of all animal eyes is now widely accepted as fact. This is based upon the shared anatomical and genetic features of all eyes; that is, all modern eyes, varied as they are, have their origins in a proto-eye believed to have evolved some 540 million years ago. The majority of the advancements in early eyes are believed to have taken only a few million years to develop, since the first predator to gain true imaging would have touched off an “arms race”. Prey animals and competing predators alike would be at a distinct disadvantage without such capabilities and would be less likely to survive and reproduce. Hence multiple eye types and subtypes developed in parallel…

The very earliest “eyes,” called eyespots, were simple patches of photoreceptor protein in unicellular animals. In multicellular beings, multicellular eyespots evolved, physically similar to the receptor patches for taste and smell. These eyespots could only sense ambient brightness: they could distinguish light and dark, but not the direction of the lightsource. (Via Wikipedia)