[Retric]

Again the issue is the theory is misleading. Those traits are conserved through evolution largely because they’re useful, but if you look at say owl skulls you find wild asymmetries because that’s more useful even our lungs are very different from each other. Hagfish lost backbones and snakes lost limbs because nothing is sacred to evolution.

So yes frogs and humans both have a visual cortex, because we both have eyes. It really doesn’t explain anything beyond that point. The human visual cortex doesn’t even map to the same structures as it expanded into nearby ones.

[evv555]

>It really doesn’t explain anything beyond that point.

I think taking a macroscopic view like this points at interesting types of analysis. Evolution is analogous to a hill climbing algorithm navigating towards local optima in a probability field. Macroscopic evolutionary trends give a low resolution peek into the underlying probability distributions.

[Retric]

That’s not what this theory is suggesting.

Frogs, birds, etc have very distinct spherical visual cortexes. Humans and squirrels don’t have that kind of spherical structure. So, other than naming where vision is processed the same thing the overlap isn’t particularly strong even at the most basic structural level.

It’s perfectly reasonable to extrapolate from studied organisms to species that share recent common ancestors. But reptiles don’t represent the probability distribution, they represent different results from that distribution under different evolutionary pressures. Extrapolation backwards and our common ancestor was very different from all decedents.