[dekhn]

The blind spot is not huge. It's easily compensated for, and it appears the mammalian eye has other attributes that make it work well. We just don't have enough data to understand whether mammalian eyes embedded a major problem that had to be compensated for, or if this design has attributes that make it desirable.

[protonfish]

Maybe, but either vertebrates or cephalopods have to have sub optimal design. My money is on the backwards retina being the kludge.

[dekhn]

No, neither is required to have a suboptimal design. Why do you think that? Mammals are quite successful.

[mikeash]

They can't both be optimal. The probability that both are exactly equally good is so remote as to be ignorable.

Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.

[breischl]

>>They can't both be optimal.

They could both be optimal for their respective uses. Humans don't spend a lot of time on the seafloor, and cephalopods don't spend a lot of time in the open air. Certainly there are other tradeoffs to be made as well.

[ghostberry]

It's 7.5° high and 5.5° wide. If you don't consider that huge, then that's up to you. But for me, that counts as huge, especially since it's fairly near the middle of vision. That's over half the width of my hand at arms length.

[dekhn]

So... this makes a difference in your daily life as a nomad hunter or software engineer how? None at all. You just don't perceive it unless you go out of your way to.

[juliangregorian]

The way you're carrying on it's almost like you were the project manager who delivered the blind spot. It's a feature, not a bug. ;)