ABSTRACT
When Darwin contemplated the design of the vertebrate eye, he had very mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was filled with awe at this remarkable result of the evolutionary process; on the other, he found it an enormous challenge to his theory of evolution by natural selection- it made him go cold, he said. Evolution is the emergence of robust generic forms of the process, driven by a sort of diffusing wave front of parameter variation starting from those values that characterize early life forms. Acetabularia lives in shallow waters around the shores of the Mediterranean. The life cycle is usually described as beginning with the fusion of two gametes. Many workers have studied various aspects of the biochemistry, physiology, and development of Acetabularia since Hammerling discovered in the 1930s that it was a single cell that could be maintained in laboratory culture.
