NLENTS
September 5, 2018, 5:16pm
76
Patrick:
Nathan, thanks for stopping by and adding expert commentary. I enjoy your book “Human Errors”. Insight from your book, actually lowered my fear and anxiety about having to go to the eye doctor and be checked for age related eye problems. Last month I went to my ophthalmologist for my regular annual eye examine. This year he took a high resolution picture of my retinas with micron resolution. And he found tiny holes in my retina. I asked him what caused them and he said that the retina is behind blood vessels that some times leak fluid. In the past these holes could grow into a full retina detachment but now he could easily tack the retina down using a laser. So I had the laser surgery the next day and I assume it is resolved. By reading your book, I realized that it was a design problem made hundred of millions of years ago. I felt very fortunate to live in a place and time where I could go for a exam, find a million years old design problem, and then fix it.
Great story! What a perfect example of how our species has used one adaptation (big brains) to compensate for poor design elsewhere! Besides the blind spot, retinal detachment is the other big problem caused by the inverted arrangement of the photoreceptor cells in the vertebrate retina. If you don’t mind, let’s talk about this over on my thread about the evolution of the eye that opens next week.
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