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A valiant effort to map the optic lobe of the octopus brain, cell by cell, has revealed a visual system with remarkable similarities and differences to our own.
The parallels are particularly interesting because they speak to the seemingly coincidental nature of convergent evolution.
Humans and octopuses diverged from a common ancestor 500 million years ago, and yet the ways our respective visual systems evolved to solve the same problems is uncanny. In spite of our different morphologies, lifestyles, and habitats, vertebrates and octopuses independently evolved a pupil and a lens that guides light onto a retina, for example.
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