There was a strange beast some 500 million years ago. Its fossils have been found in Canada and Australia, and they have been a mystery of sorts for paleontologists. The mystery centered on unanswered questions: What exactly did an Anomalocaris * look like, and further, did it look? Of course, there’s also the question about what Anomalocaris did for a living.
When one has only a flattened form, reconstructing a three-dimensional critter requires both painstaking work and a bit of imagination. The late Stephen Jay Gould covers both that work and imagination in his retelling the story of Canada’s Burgess Shale in Wonderful Life. ** In early paleontological studies Anomalocaris was a strange creature, variously grouped with sea cucumbers (starfish relatives), jellyfish, and shrimp, all imaginative guesses made in the absence of a complete fossil. What? A creature belonging to three different phyla? Linnaeus would have turned over in his grave! But who could blame anyone for imaginative reconstructions? The circular mouth, for example, was assumed to be a part or the whole of a jellyfish because it “looked” like a jellyfish, though an unusual jellyfish with a central “donut” hole. The feeding appendages on the front of Anomalocaris looked like the tail end of a shrimp. So, the front of the fossil was by some accounts the assumed backend of the fossil.
As you can see from one of the reconstructions shown online, Anomalocaris apparently had eyes as big as the Big Bad Wolf’s. In the Cambrian seas, when so many life-forms were eyeless, the eyes gave the predator a decided advantage—if the interpretation that it was a carnivorous predator is unshakably correct.
But those eyes. In one species of Anomalocaris, the eyes are fixed to the head. In another, they are on stalks much like a crab’s eye stalks (J. R. Paterson, G. D. Edgecombe, D. C. García-Bellido, 2020).*** What do those eyes reveal? What did they see? And why bring up the subject of those eyes? Hasn’t the fossil been subjected to enough scrutiny since the 1880s? Are we supposed to draw some lesson from its eyes?
Whatever it saw, Anomalocaris saw through compound eyes: Thousands of hexagonal individual lenses grouped together in a most efficient structure, the structure found in snowflakes, beehives, and columnar basalts, all examples of Nature’s saving energy when it constructs similar adjacent units. Energy-saving and space-saving in a beehive means more cells for more bees in less space. Early on in life’s history, evolution appears to have chosen efficiency and simplicity as a survival mechanism. Why not beehives of circles? Aren’t circles known for their efficient ratio of circumference to area? If bees made hives of circles, there would be gaps among adjacent circles. Adjacent squares would eliminate gaps, of course, but they wouldn’t incorporate as many cells as hexagons that, in a beehive, appear to be just the right size to accommodate a bee. Try it out: Draw touching circles, then touching squares, and finally touching hexagons. Hexagons: They’re the reason Anomalocaris had thousands of lenses.
Seeing. It’s role in life can’t be overestimated. And we use the idea of seeing for more than just visual acuity. Think insight. Think foresight. Think of Tiresias, the mythological blind “seer.” Seeing is understanding. Seeing is knowing. For doubting Thomases, seeing is believing.
Of course, none of our meanings had any meaning for Anomalocaris. Such seeing required the evolution of consciousness. Our own vision isn’t just a matter of a lens through which light travels to the fovea. Our brains do the seeing. Circular eyeballs contain a blind spot, so the brain fills in the missing part of an image. We don’t see that blind spot unless we look for it, easily observed with two separated dots on a sheet of paper. And our eyes don’t move smoothly as they scan the world around us. Those saccades by which the eyes jump as they scan a line of prose or a field of vision let us know that much of what we do isn’t what we think we do. Eyes bear in their form and function a lesson about the way we understand personal worlds.
The compound eyes of insects and Anomalocaris can detect light and dark, maybe even color or wavelengths that we can’t see, as bees, for example, see more of the blue end of the spectrum than we see. What they see, instinct interprets and then initiates action. What we see, brains infuse with meaning and enhance or distort with memories, expectations, biases, and motivations.
In that “primitive” Cambrian world of the Burgess Shale, life evolved compound seeing, but not complex meaning. But with the rise of consciousness, that is, the rise of complex meaning, came an accompanying rise in misinterpretation and in seeing what isn’t really there. That monster predator of the Cambrian seas saw and acted. We sometimes see and doubt. We sometimes say, “I can’t believe what I am seeing.” Or, in the sense of the brain’s “seeing,” we sometimes refuse to acknowledge what we see is, in fact, reality. Such, for example, is the way we see our own financial circumstances, our social lives, our political leanings, and our environments.
Seeing has been around for a long time. It’s been efficient for a long time, also, performing its important survival function. But foreseeing and embellishing are relatively young on the Phanerozoic Time Scale. It’s the human seeing that put ayes in eyes. It’s the human seeing that also put nays in eyes. We’re always centered on seeing that with which we agree as opposed to that with which we don’t agree. We see what is agreeable. We see what is disagreeable. And it isn’t the physical eyes that do such “seeing.” It’s a brain fixed or flexible, like the sessile or motile eyes that characterize two different species of Anomalocaris.
But let’s not leave the subject without mentioning those tightly packed hexagonal lenses one more time. Each of the lenses revealed a blurry “pixel” of the total image, the coverage dependent on the proximity to and angle of the observed object. Thousands of lenses cannot see with the clarity of the human eye. But without advanced consciousness and its attendant pitfalls, all those ancient critters saw the world in exactly the same way. They placed no preferential value or meaning beyond their basic needs for survival. Interesting, isn’t it. We believe we see clearly because we have clear, focused images of a smooth fields of view. Yet, our mental “seeing” is almost always blurred by the brain’s lenses of preference that turn external reality into the reality we want to see.
*Anomalocaris is pronounced variously with a long or a short final a. Ah NOM’ alow car’iss, the “car” being either just the word car or with a longer a as in the word care. Various speakers also change the place of the major accent. Or, Ah nom’ ah LOC’ care iss. See an animation here for the short a sound and a major accent on nom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ice47loNmsc and here https://www.howtopronounce.com/anomalocaris and here and for a pronunciation that puts the major accent on lo or on loc, go to: https://www.synonyms.com/pronounce/anomalocaris
See the drawing by Aaron John Gregory at https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=drawing+of+anomalocaris&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fimg07.deviantart.net%2F4a32%2Fi%2F2015%2F257%2F4%2Fa%2Fanomalocaris_by_aaronjohngregory-d5k7bu1.jpg#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fimg07.deviantart.net%2F4a32%2Fi%2F2015%2F257%2F4%2Fa%2Fanomalocaris_by_aaronjohngregory-d5k7bu1.jpg&action=click
Drawings: https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrEeR7zutpfGEAA2AUPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=anomalocaris+images&fr=yhs-iba-syn&hspart=iba&hsimp=yhs-syn
**Gould, Stephen Jay. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York. Norton & Company. Pp. 194-204
***J. R. Paterson, G. D. Edgecombe, D. C. García-Bellido, Disparate compound eyes of Cambrian radiodonts reveal their developmental growth mode and diverse visual ecology. Sci. Adv. 6, eabc6721 (2020). https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/6/49/eabc6721.full.pdf
When one has only a flattened form, reconstructing a three-dimensional critter requires both painstaking work and a bit of imagination. The late Stephen Jay Gould covers both that work and imagination in his retelling the story of Canada’s Burgess Shale in Wonderful Life. ** In early paleontological studies Anomalocaris was a strange creature, variously grouped with sea cucumbers (starfish relatives), jellyfish, and shrimp, all imaginative guesses made in the absence of a complete fossil. What? A creature belonging to three different phyla? Linnaeus would have turned over in his grave! But who could blame anyone for imaginative reconstructions? The circular mouth, for example, was assumed to be a part or the whole of a jellyfish because it “looked” like a jellyfish, though an unusual jellyfish with a central “donut” hole. The feeding appendages on the front of Anomalocaris looked like the tail end of a shrimp. So, the front of the fossil was by some accounts the assumed backend of the fossil.
As you can see from one of the reconstructions shown online, Anomalocaris apparently had eyes as big as the Big Bad Wolf’s. In the Cambrian seas, when so many life-forms were eyeless, the eyes gave the predator a decided advantage—if the interpretation that it was a carnivorous predator is unshakably correct.
But those eyes. In one species of Anomalocaris, the eyes are fixed to the head. In another, they are on stalks much like a crab’s eye stalks (J. R. Paterson, G. D. Edgecombe, D. C. García-Bellido, 2020).*** What do those eyes reveal? What did they see? And why bring up the subject of those eyes? Hasn’t the fossil been subjected to enough scrutiny since the 1880s? Are we supposed to draw some lesson from its eyes?
Whatever it saw, Anomalocaris saw through compound eyes: Thousands of hexagonal individual lenses grouped together in a most efficient structure, the structure found in snowflakes, beehives, and columnar basalts, all examples of Nature’s saving energy when it constructs similar adjacent units. Energy-saving and space-saving in a beehive means more cells for more bees in less space. Early on in life’s history, evolution appears to have chosen efficiency and simplicity as a survival mechanism. Why not beehives of circles? Aren’t circles known for their efficient ratio of circumference to area? If bees made hives of circles, there would be gaps among adjacent circles. Adjacent squares would eliminate gaps, of course, but they wouldn’t incorporate as many cells as hexagons that, in a beehive, appear to be just the right size to accommodate a bee. Try it out: Draw touching circles, then touching squares, and finally touching hexagons. Hexagons: They’re the reason Anomalocaris had thousands of lenses.
Seeing. It’s role in life can’t be overestimated. And we use the idea of seeing for more than just visual acuity. Think insight. Think foresight. Think of Tiresias, the mythological blind “seer.” Seeing is understanding. Seeing is knowing. For doubting Thomases, seeing is believing.
Of course, none of our meanings had any meaning for Anomalocaris. Such seeing required the evolution of consciousness. Our own vision isn’t just a matter of a lens through which light travels to the fovea. Our brains do the seeing. Circular eyeballs contain a blind spot, so the brain fills in the missing part of an image. We don’t see that blind spot unless we look for it, easily observed with two separated dots on a sheet of paper. And our eyes don’t move smoothly as they scan the world around us. Those saccades by which the eyes jump as they scan a line of prose or a field of vision let us know that much of what we do isn’t what we think we do. Eyes bear in their form and function a lesson about the way we understand personal worlds.
The compound eyes of insects and Anomalocaris can detect light and dark, maybe even color or wavelengths that we can’t see, as bees, for example, see more of the blue end of the spectrum than we see. What they see, instinct interprets and then initiates action. What we see, brains infuse with meaning and enhance or distort with memories, expectations, biases, and motivations.
In that “primitive” Cambrian world of the Burgess Shale, life evolved compound seeing, but not complex meaning. But with the rise of consciousness, that is, the rise of complex meaning, came an accompanying rise in misinterpretation and in seeing what isn’t really there. That monster predator of the Cambrian seas saw and acted. We sometimes see and doubt. We sometimes say, “I can’t believe what I am seeing.” Or, in the sense of the brain’s “seeing,” we sometimes refuse to acknowledge what we see is, in fact, reality. Such, for example, is the way we see our own financial circumstances, our social lives, our political leanings, and our environments.
Seeing has been around for a long time. It’s been efficient for a long time, also, performing its important survival function. But foreseeing and embellishing are relatively young on the Phanerozoic Time Scale. It’s the human seeing that put ayes in eyes. It’s the human seeing that also put nays in eyes. We’re always centered on seeing that with which we agree as opposed to that with which we don’t agree. We see what is agreeable. We see what is disagreeable. And it isn’t the physical eyes that do such “seeing.” It’s a brain fixed or flexible, like the sessile or motile eyes that characterize two different species of Anomalocaris.
But let’s not leave the subject without mentioning those tightly packed hexagonal lenses one more time. Each of the lenses revealed a blurry “pixel” of the total image, the coverage dependent on the proximity to and angle of the observed object. Thousands of lenses cannot see with the clarity of the human eye. But without advanced consciousness and its attendant pitfalls, all those ancient critters saw the world in exactly the same way. They placed no preferential value or meaning beyond their basic needs for survival. Interesting, isn’t it. We believe we see clearly because we have clear, focused images of a smooth fields of view. Yet, our mental “seeing” is almost always blurred by the brain’s lenses of preference that turn external reality into the reality we want to see.
*Anomalocaris is pronounced variously with a long or a short final a. Ah NOM’ alow car’iss, the “car” being either just the word car or with a longer a as in the word care. Various speakers also change the place of the major accent. Or, Ah nom’ ah LOC’ care iss. See an animation here for the short a sound and a major accent on nom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ice47loNmsc and here https://www.howtopronounce.com/anomalocaris and here and for a pronunciation that puts the major accent on lo or on loc, go to: https://www.synonyms.com/pronounce/anomalocaris
See the drawing by Aaron John Gregory at https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=drawing+of+anomalocaris&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fimg07.deviantart.net%2F4a32%2Fi%2F2015%2F257%2F4%2Fa%2Fanomalocaris_by_aaronjohngregory-d5k7bu1.jpg#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fimg07.deviantart.net%2F4a32%2Fi%2F2015%2F257%2F4%2Fa%2Fanomalocaris_by_aaronjohngregory-d5k7bu1.jpg&action=click
Drawings: https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrEeR7zutpfGEAA2AUPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=anomalocaris+images&fr=yhs-iba-syn&hspart=iba&hsimp=yhs-syn
**Gould, Stephen Jay. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York. Norton & Company. Pp. 194-204
***J. R. Paterson, G. D. Edgecombe, D. C. García-Bellido, Disparate compound eyes of Cambrian radiodonts reveal their developmental growth mode and diverse visual ecology. Sci. Adv. 6, eabc6721 (2020). https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/6/49/eabc6721.full.pdf
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