Mark Peterson wrote:
>... the cells of the human eye and the neural system of
>the brain essentially willed themselves to change how they function based
>on their recognition of a far removed apparent need of the body to more
>clearly resolve predators in the horizontal plain, and then spent a few
>million years making the cellular changes required to accomplish the goal.
....
>

There is an orthogonal dimension to this argument, which has
been overlooked here.

Somewhere around 1983, Hubel and Wiesel from Harvard University
won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that the central visual
systems (ie, cortical, not retinal) in immature mammalian brains
are able to **modify** their internal organization based upon early
visual experience. If you present horizontal bars only to them,
they have difficulty later seeing vertical. And vice versa. Etc/etc.

It only requires a few weeks of experience during the critical
period of early out-of-the-womb development to accomplish this,
and is related only to that "young brains are very maleable", and
to **NOTHING** more.

In relationship to the survival of the individual regardless of
the environment it is born into, this scheme is vastly superior
to any kind of hardwiring. [this also explains why it's so much
more fun to play with self-modifying code, as opposed to the
hard-wired kind].