视觉是我们和其他动物获取关于我们周围世界的大部分信息的感觉。达尔文意识到，乍一看，人类的眼睛可能是通过自然选择进化出来的，这似乎很荒谬。但我们现在对视觉的了解要多得多，它在自然界中独立进化了很多次，以及各种令人惊讶的视觉方式。人眼的晶状体在敏感的视网膜上形成图像，只代表一个。扇贝、虾和龙虾都以不同的方式使用镜子。跳蛛用前视扫描，检查前方的物体是要吃的昆虫、要交配的另一只蜘蛛，还是要躲避的捕食者。螳螂虾甚至可以测量光的偏振。
动物的眼睛是惊人的结构，通常涉及精确的光学和令人印象深刻的信息处理，主要使用湿蛋白质——而不是工程师为此类任务选择的物质。在《看的眼睛》一书中，世界领先的视觉专家之一迈克尔·兰德探索了视觉在自然界中进化和使用的各种方式，并描述了研究人员用来揭开其秘密的一些巧妙实验。他还讨论了人类的视觉，包括他关于我们的眼球运动如何帮助我们完成日常任务的实验，以及一些熟练的任务，比如看电视、听音乐或开车。最后，他思考了一个有趣的问题：我们眼睛里不断变化的图像如何在大脑中转化为我们所经历的世界的稳定而完整的意识视图。
Eyes to See: The Astonishing Variety of Vision in Nature (EPUB)
Vision is the sense by which we and other animals obtain most of our information about the world around us. Darwin appreciated that at first sight it seems absurd that the human eye could have evolved by natural selection. But we now know far more about vision, the many times it has independently evolved in nature, and the astonishing variety of ways to see. The human eye, with a lens forming an image on a sensitive retina, represents just one. Scallops, shrimps, and lobsters all use mirrors in different ways. Jumping spiders scan with their front-facing eyes to check whether the object in front is an insect to eat, another spider to mate with, or a predator to avoid. Mantis shrimps can even measure the polarization of light.
Animal eyes are amazing structures, often involving precision optics and impressive information processing, mainly using wet protein – not the substance an engineer would choose for such tasks. In Eyes to See, Michael Land, one of the leading world experts on vision, explores the varied ways in which sight has evolved and is used in the natural world, and describes some of the ingenious experiments researchers have used to uncover its secrets. He also discusses human vision, including his experiments on how our eye movements help us to do everyday tasks, as well as skilled ones such as sight-reading music or driving. He ends by considering the fascinating problem of how the constantly shifting images from our eyes are converted in the brain into the steady and integrated conscious view of the world we experience.

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