Eye See versus I See

One of the Webcomics I follow is currently featuring a character evolved from bees who has compound eyes. That got me to thinking about insects with their compound eyes and how they might see the world. . . People always show views through compound eye as a bunch of miniature full images. That's always bothered me, -- like it has to be wrong. Seems like they would see like one pixel of color/light/dark information from each lens which their brain would merge into a single picture -- like Georges Seurat's Pointillist paintings. It makes much more sense to see a single, large, albeit very grainy image, rather than 8 zillion tiny views of the same thing. If that's all they had to go by -- multiple very tiny but identical images, all of which had terrible resolution and very little useful info, -- how could an organism like that survive? How could they quickly spot and recognize danger or find food? I mean, Duh! Makes much more sense if their multiple lenses are trying to do what we do with our retinas -- create a complex full-scale image from a large number of single data points -- Doing it with lenses will work, but only up to a point (the point of diminishing returns) and that point is reached very quickly. Notice how all the animals with compound eyes are all small, short lived, reproduce quickly, and are successful pretty much because they breed in such statistical-overkill-enormous numbers that their survival is due more to the law of averages than anything else?-- Obviously,"evolution" realized pretty quickly it was on the wrong track and went with a single lens/image to refract and spread the light across ever increasing numbers of cones and rods of a retina, each of which sends its one pixel of info to our brains, and the brain resolves them into a single image. The more pixels, the higher the resolution and the more detailed the image is. -- like Duh! If you want to know which system works best, all you have to do is look around at which animals have compound lens eyes and which animals (like the one writing this blog, for instance) have single-lens eyes.

Which reminds me of one of the (many) things that "blew me out of" that old 1950's movie version of "War of the Worlds" starring Gene Barry. When they looked through the Martian "eye" thingie that Gene Barry chopped off with the ax. They got three separate, different colored images, red, blue and green that kind of overlapped a little and were really anemic looking. And those idiot scientists blathered on about That's how the Martians see us. (and, of course, the woman took one look at the image and screamed -- that's all women ever do in those stupid 1940's and 1950's movies is scream and have the vapors. Give me a break!) Some scientists! -- They of all people should know that it's not what the eye sees that counts-- that's all just raw data. It's what the brain sees that's important. If the Martians were smart enough to build those stupid flying saucer thingies with the death ray emitting street lamps on their noses, those "eye" thingies would have had some kind of processing software to integrate the data from those three different images into a single composite full color image -- -- which is exactly what the old cathode ray tube color TV process did. It had three "guns" (red, blue and green) firing pixel streams at the front of the tube. The three different single color images were superimposed on each other to create the full integrated color image -- It's the same idea the old technicolor film used. Duh. I've understood the process since Junior High, when the "green gun" blew out on the picture tube of our color TV. We had to watch pink and blue TV til we got it fixed. (I do have to admit that old movie did have some pretty cool sound effects, though. )