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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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We're diurnal, and have eyes optimised to see maximum colour and detail instead of well in dim light (at least by mammal standards). It makes sense we'd gravitate to fairly dark conditions to sleep, because while nature at night is not perfectly unlit, it's still pretty dark. Darker than a developed-world urban area will ever get, for example.
That being said, many people are completely capable of sleeping in a bright area, myself included.
As for the bonus question, yes, the hormones at least work backwards in nocturnal animals. Melatonin wakes something like a shrew up.
Human variation.
There's two main structures in our eyes.
Rods: take large amounts of any wave length of light
Cones: take in a very small amount of a specific wavelength and only that wavelength
Most of the area (like 95%) are rods. And there's a couple (usually three) types of cones.
Some people have more different types of cones, and can see more differences in color. Some have less types meaning less cones overall even.
But the eye won't just have more blank spots. So it fills in with more rods.
This is actually related to why the further away from the equator people got, the lighter their eyes got.
With longer variation in day/night cycle, it was advantages to let as much light in as possible. That outweighed the downside of too much light during the day, as that could be solved with hat brims, or that age old move where you make a visor with your palm.
By limiting the amount of light going to your rods, your cones get less "washed out" and that's how we get more detail/colors.
But even in a single population, there's going to be a lot of human variation. Rod/cone distribution has a high amount of variability even when genetics are steady. Genetics has a large effect, but it's not like the body always follows directions closely.
I could nitpick some of the details there, but instead maybe I'll just ask what point you're trying to make? A healthy human can still pick out something small way better than a goat.
Sometimes...
Depending on if you're talking about motion, color, or lowlight.
But since when is "optimized" just "better than a goat"?
Like, cats easily blow everything else out of the water.
Optimised just means designed for something at the expense of other parameters. We lost our tepetum lucidum at some point in evolution, probably for the 3x-ish resolution gain, while becoming much more shit in lowlight in the process. That's a tradeoff, but a good one for a tree-based diurnal frugivore.
Cats (for example) still have theirs, which means light as two chances to hit their retina, but means there's an upper limit on how clear an image can be, exactly because there's light bouncing around. It sounds like 20/100 is typical for them, from a quick search. Cats are traditionally thought to be dichromats, as well.
And humans usually have three, but sometimes it's two, and even rarely 4...
With that much variations (including other ways) it's hard to say human eyes are optimized for any condition.
There are very few examples of things in nature that are truly optimized for all of its environment.
Humans are just too widespread with too much variation to say we're optimized for anything.
We just have too much in species variation.
We actually have less genetic variation than most animals. There was a lot of bottlenecking in the paleolithic. And what little we do have is still mostly confined to Africa, because the rest or the world shared common ancestry as we left our original continent.
Like, 1 in 200 people is colourblind, or something? I don't think that's a reasonable argument that we're not trichromats.
You're talking genetic variation, I'm talking phenotype variation...
....
Again, you're talking genetics, where it is clearly broken down in 2,3,4.
However like pretty much everything else, it's not that clear cut just because the plans were.
Two people with the same amount of different types of cones are not guaranteed to have the same rod/cone ratio. Even when they have similar genetics for the ratio, things rarely go according to plan as a human develops.
Like, you know that's why facial symmetry is attractive right? It shows that things on both halves went according to plan. Which especially for women is a huge bonus for reproductive health.
Especially for something made up of a whole bunch of small things like rods/cones, it's not even perfect for identical twins.