The eyes have it! Deep time and future visionThe eyes have it! Deep time and future vision
All In The Mind
Some call the eyes the window on the soul. Trevor Lamb has been gazing into the eyes of living fossil 'fishy' beings, and deep into evolutionary time to unravel the beginnings of our incredible seeing organ. And what about its future? A myopia explosion in East Asian cities has folk worried, and there's good evidence for a surprising cause.
30:07•31 Oct 2009
Love Eyes, Living Fossils and the Short-Sighted City
Episode Overview
- The vertebrate eye likely emerged through many gradual evolutionary stages, with hagfish and lamprey offering present-day clues.
- Our eye carries "design flaws" like a blind spot due to the way it evolved from earlier structures.
- Myopia rates have risen dramatically in East Asian cities, reaching around 70–90% in teenagers in places such as Guangzhou and Singapore.
- Environmental factors, especially limited outdoor time and bright light exposure, appear more important than genetics in driving modern myopia.
- Increasing children’s time outside is being tested as a simple, non-invasive strategy to reduce new cases of myopia in Chinese schools.
“"Children who spend more time outside are less likely to become myopic, even if they have myopic parents, or even if they do enormous amounts of study and achieve."”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This time the focus shifts from alcohol to eyesight, but the big theme is the same: how modern life reshapes our bodies and brains. All In The Mind zeroes in on our eyes, mixing evolutionary biology with present-day health worries. Professor Trevor Lamb shares his fascination with the "most beautiful organ in the whole body" and explains how the vertebrate eye may have changed the course of animal history.
Using two "living fossils" – the slime-spewing, almost blind hagfish and the gruesome, fang-ringed lamprey – he talks through how a simple light-sensitive patch may have gradually become the complex camera-style eye humans rely on today. As he puts it, "if our ancestors hadn't evolved the eye of the kind that we still have, we wouldn't be here." The conversation doesn’t shy away from controversy, touching on creationist arguments about whether something so intricate could arise through natural selection.
Lamb points to genetic evidence and present-day species as clues that evolution worked in many small steps rather than conjuring a perfect eye overnight. Then the focus jumps to the future of our vision with Professor Ian Morgan. He outlines an alarming rise in myopia across East Asian cities, where up to 90% of school-leavers in places like Singapore and Guangzhou are short-sighted. His research suggests that environment, not genetics, is driving this trend. One striking finding?
Kids in Singapore spend about half an hour outside after school, compared with roughly three hours in Australia. "Children who spend more time outside are less likely to become myopic," he notes, pointing to bright outdoor light and dopamine in the retina as a likely protective combo. For anyone thinking about health in a modern, high-pressure world – including people rebuilding life in recovery – this episode offers a sharp reminder: your environment can quietly reshape you.
How might a bit more time in the sunshine help your eyes and your mind?
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