Cooperative eye hypothesis Cooperative eye hypothesis The cooperative eye hypothesis is a proposed explanation for the appearance of the human eye. It suggests that the eye's distinctive visible characteristics evolved to make it easier for humans to follow another's gaze while communicating or while working together on tasks. Unlike other primates, human beings have eyes with a distinct colour contrast between the white sclera, the coloured iris, and the black pupil. This is due to a lack of pigment in the sclera. Other primates have pigmented sclerae that are brown or dark in colour. There is also a higher contrast between human skin,
Arthropod eye more complex schizochroal eye was found only in one sub-order of trilobite, the Phacopina (Ordovician-Silurian). It has no modern counterpart. The eye has up to 700 larger lenses with individual sclera separating each lens. Each lens has a cornea. Schizochroal eyes developed from holochroal ones and were more powerful with overlapping visual fields. They were particularly useful for nocturnal vision and possibly for colour and depth analysis. The lenses of the eye were constructed from single calcite crystals. Early schizochroal eye designs were rather haphazard and irregular, though constrained by the geometrical requirements of packing identical sized lenses on a