Material World - 05/03/2009

Quentin Cooper hears about the latest remarkable example of natural selection - a fish eye that focuses light using a dished mirror - and how it illustrates Charles Darwin's 150-year-old theory. Darwin recognised that the eye, in all its perfection, could represent a real problem for the theory of evolution. But in fact, with hundreds of different seeing organs specialising in different functions across the animal kingdom, the eye actually reveals the great inventiveness of natural selection. Quentin also finds out about Kepler's Astronomia Nova or New Astronomy of 1609, and how it revolutionised science.