Jan wrote:

Ubjon wrote:Dawkins is a great educator and if I was a science teacher I'd definately record this programme to show to kids.

I agree he is. That's why his books have had such an impact IMO. I wasn't a science major and The Blind Watchmaker completely extinguished the dying embers of my belief in a God-created world. He took every single argument and just nailed them, using accessible language and superb metaphors. His "Growing up in the Universe" programmes illustrate his expertise beautifully too.

I've always been atheist but I found The Selfish Gene extremely useful in understanding evolution from a gene point of view. I'd make it mandatory reading as part of the science curriculum (If we still have one in the UK with the tories in power) for those kids with an interest in biology.

Nice description of cephalopod eye evolution. Vertebrate eyes, however, must have come by a different route, involving a convex, non-imaging light sensor evolving when a population of hagfish-like fish were gradually forced into shallower (ie, brighter-lit) water than they had been adapted to. The geological circumstances are described here:
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/480935-greatest-show-on-earth-a-quibble/comments?page=1#comment_626447It
comes in two possible versions:
1 The lamprey (extant jawless fish). Evidence: more-or-less fully vertebrate eyes as adults, but hagfish-like as benthic filter-feeding larvae - eye metamorphosis therefore must have been compressed in later verterbrates.
2 Tremataspis (extinct jawlessfish with imaging eyes for seeing bioluminscence on the dark ocean floor), leading to acanthodians (extinct jawed fish). Evidence: vague similarity of morphology between the two.
More detailed study of the eye-brain metamorphosis of lamprey larvae would help on (1), but (2) may be forever inconclusive, as there are no extant intermediates to study the detailed biology of. We will never know what kind of retina tremataspis or any acanthodians had.