Our short-sighted inner fish: Vision explains why our fish ancestors came on to land

400 million years ago, fish made the evolutionary leap from water to land. If they hadn’t, you might not be reading this sentence. Why? Because it led to more complex cognition. A new study by Northwestern professor Malcolm MacIver and Claremont Colleges professor Lars Schmitz discovered a near tripling of eye size might be what triggered the invasion of land. They show that this increase in the eye size of animals that span the gap between fish and four-legged land animals was most likely because these ani