[Lestat]

Thanks to everyone for their responses. They were more insightful than I had hoped. Aver-aging, you seem to have far more than an average layman's knowledge of this. Thanks. Much of what you stated let's me make better sense of the eye.

Also, thanks to gumpzilla. I'll have to read, "Mount Improbable". I've heard of it, but have been too lazy to buy and read it. I'm encouraged to do so now.

I'm still a little slow on this though. While I can comprehend a cell being sensitive to light, and moving towards light (I understand this, because it makes sense how this might be beneficial to an organism), I still don't get how a cell can go from sensing light, to picking out the intricate details in a leaf for example.

Well, I guess I can imagine it, but why? There's a whole world we never would've known about if we couldn't see if we didn't developed the sense to experience it. Can we go on to hearing?

So there was a time when an organism could sense sound because the ground shook due to a loud noise. Over time, what happened? That sound started being sensed more and more intimately by certain cells until it could actually hear all sorts of different wavelengths?

I think this whole subject is fascinating. How a cell went from sensing light or sound, to develop more cells to pick up all the fine details of it. I wrote a post a while back on how many things are out there that we do not have the ability to sense. I suppose there are quite a lot, like UV and gamma rays, etc. Oh, and...

I just read that scientists think they discovered that birds can actually see magnetic fields! That's literally see with their eyes. Until now, it was thought they could only sense them through some sort of internal compass. Yes, evolution is amazing!