http://news.yahoo.com/photo/060109/480/nyet27501091906
warning: contains potentially disturbing picture of a cyclops cat
I read about this the other day. It’s a pity the little fella died so quickly, but at the same time I’m not sure how much of a life he would have had anyway.
Gotta love life’s little oddities.
taking strictly emotional side apart (we’re of course sad about the little kitty), such episodes can let us think about how incredibly sofisticated life is.
I mean: to be born with two eyes is the result of evolution and a combination of mechanisms which all worked well. What I find really fascinating is that in this case the cat was not born completely disfigured, instead it was born with one perfect eye at the center, like (speaking like a software programmer) if its genome had the “eye” object correctly formed, but properties such “number” and “position” were not good. At least not as good as we consider it to be good. The cat wasn’t born with its left eye only: he was born with a center eye! I consider this very fascinating. Sorry if I’ve made someone puke 