Jason,
Apologies for calling you Jeremy up the thread. Inexcusable.
This is very interesting - there are few iif any technological solutions that are not prefigured in the biological world. A scanning eye is fascinating to someone who has worked with scanning optical systems.
I think there is room on this thread for the grown-ups to have an exchange, don’t you think? I see that you are using the fact of evolution to figure out conserved developmental features in vertebrate eyes. In particular you are doing work on retinal progenitor cells in zebrafish, animals that can regernerate their retinas That’s cool.
**I am particularly interested in the work in your lab on the role of Mueller glial cells (from the lab website). ** I understand the role of the Notch signalling pathway in cell to cell signalling and cell differentaition, but I don’t understand the precise hypothesis you guys are working on. Is it that Notch signalling regulates the Mueller cells to develop as glial cells rather than neurons so that if the Notch pathway is activated in teleosts then retinal regeneration is blocked? - the idea then being that down-regulation of Notch could lead to retinal regeneration from Mueller cells? Sorry if this is complete garbage - have I understood anything at all?
What has this to do with apologetics? Well, it’s a partial antidote to the appalling childish behaviour we’ve seen on this thread and the fundamentalist argument that the Theory of Evolution is useless (as well as wrong). But actually, it has no apologetic foundation - I’m just interested.
Alec
evolutionpages.com