Wonder-Sighting on Planet Earth: The Space Telescope Eye of the Scallop

Inside Earth’s most alien vision.

“The Eye altering alters all,” William Blake wrote not long before Darwin extolled the eye as the crown jewel of evolution — an organ of “such wonderful structure” and “inimitable perfection” that it magnetizes us to the mystery of life itself. In On the Origin of Species, he began a section titled “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication” with a love letter to the eye:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus ...