Simon Ings - simonings at gmail.com

This is a book about the nature of the eye. It is about all the eyes that are, and ever have been, and may yet be. It is about how we see the world, and how other eyes see it. It is about what happens to the world when it is looked at, and about what happens to us when we look at each other. It is about evolution, chemistry, optics, colour, psychology, anthropology, and consciousness. It is about what we know, and it is also about how we came to know it. So this is also a book about personal ambition, folly, failure, confusion, and language.

You can buy The Eye: a Natural History at Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com has the American edition, A Natural History of Seeing

UK: Bloomsbury. 1st hardback edition, March 2007

UK: Bloomsbury. Paperback, January 2008

Germany: Hoffman und Campe, April 2008

USA: Norton, October 2008

Italy: Einaudi, October 2008

Japan: Hayakawa, 2008
Portugal: Aletheia, 2008

Click here to download:

The_Eye_a_Natural_HIstory_tag_.zip (528 KB)

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October 26, 2009

The Eye: what the reviewers said

Ings argues convincingly that the eye has had a profound effect on our language, perception, philosophy and even consciousness… Ings deals with these, as he does all parts of this thoroughly engaging book, with refreshing clarity, enthusiasm and vigour. It’s a real eye-opener, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Doug Johnstone, The Times, March 10, 2007

In The Eye: A Natural History, the novelist and science writer Simon Ings explores evolution's alleged masterpiece from several perspectives, including optics, physiology, history, medicine and biochemistry. It is a rich and eclectic survey, with an intriguing nugget on almost every page. Ings has done his homework and is not afraid to find fault with new ideas that don't pass muster.
Graham Farmelo, Sunday Telegraph, March 24

[Ings] rightly asserts that 'the story of the eye is epic', and this is an impressive attempt to summarise its 538-million-year history. There are times when the encyclopaedic scale of the endeavour rather overwhelms the reader, but it's easy to share his genuine wonder at the sheer oddness of some of the mechanisms of sight.
P D Smith, the Guardian, June 2

In this ambitious work, Ings reaches into chemistry, evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, aesthetics and his own fertile imagination to produce an agglomeration of ideas and themes, aimed at neither the specialist nor the idiot, but somewhere tantalisingly in between. In many ways it’s the perfectly judged popular-science book: he assumes little or no prior knowledge, but he does take for granted an open mind and a certain curiosity. His book will bring out the intelligent 12-year-old in us all. You may even look on the world with new eyes.
Marcus Berkmann, The Spectator, March 31
(requires subscription; the review has been reprinted here)

Ings has succeeded in writing an elegant, entertaining and up-to-date overview of cutting-edge research. He tells the story "episodically", in a "mix of history, science and anecdote" that is utterly compelling.
Gail Vines, the Independent, April 25

Ings has a good eye for memorable anecdotes and striking facts. More importantly, The Eye is always readable, and Ings is a very good explainer of scientific concepts.
Robert Hanks, the Telegraph, March 18

The evolution of the human eye sounds a potentially arid subject, but not as treated by Simon Ings, who seamlessly blends natural history with personal observation (the progress of his baby daughter), visual conundrums (illustrations punctuate the text), and a real sense of wonder.
There are fascinating facts galore: our eyes are never still, for example. As well as entertaining, it's philosophically profound: showing how our eyes, far from simply absorbing the world, are tools with which we construct our own reality.
Katie Owen, the Sunday Telegraph, 27 January 2008

Voles communicate by leaving trails of urine that (happily for the hungry kestrel) reflect ultraviolet light. Simon Ings will cheerfully supply you with a whole feast of such tasty morsels in this expansive history of the eye. But while his book may satisfy a nerdy hunger for trivia, it is much more than just a compendium of information, ambitiously blending science with philosophy and drawing on history and anecdotes. The latter, which often focus on his daughter, are impressive for somehow avoiding mawkishness; in one of the book's most moving sections, Ings considers their respective ageing and sight. It all makes for a surprisingly appealing and readable book, helped along by the odd judicious diagram. Read it and you will never see things in the same way.
Hermione Buckland-Hoby, the Observer, January 27

The mirror of the soul? In Homo sapiens, maybe. But in this account of that remarkable organ, the eye, Ings goes beyond the human... The more complex his material, the clearer his prose becomes. He is equally at ease with mathematics, philosophy, palaeontology and history in this cornucopia of facts and folklore about the eye... this far-ranging and wonderfully eclectic work is popular science at its best.
Ross Leckie, The Times January 25

Charles Darwin wrote that thinking about the evolution of the eye gave him a “cold shudder”. The organ’s complexity tested his theory to the limits, yet so necessary has eyesight become to species’ survival that some scientists estimate the eye has evolved independently at least 40 times. As Ings puts it, “There are only a handful of really good ideas in nature”, and eyesight is one of them. There is a lot of science in Ings’s account, but it is leavened by engaging forays into history and biography. He relates such fascinating subjects as the ability of the Thai Moken tribe to see underwater, and Woody Allen’s rare skill in raising the inner corners of his eyebrows.
Ian Critchley, The Sunday Times, January 27

'Popular science' now too often refers to books about penguins' feet and the like, so it is a relief to find a work that demonstrates genuine learning and intellectual passion. Simon Ings takes us elegantly through the 600-million-year history of the eye, explaining its differing functions in humans and animals, and discussing philosophical thoughts about vision. The result is a narrative as arresting and remarkable as any fiction, accessible but complete, with the reader assumed to be an intelligent adult on the lookout for something substantial. An excellent guide to one of the world's true wonders.
the Telegraph, February 2

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October 26, 2009

An eye for the eye : Slideshow : Nature News

via nature.com

I prepared this visual presentation for Nature's Darwin celebrations in 2009

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October 26, 2009

The soul stealers

Guardian, Saturday 19 January 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/19/humanrights.idcards#

Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow, carried the first messages from the gods to man; 3,000 years later, the flow of communication is to be reversed. There are plans afoot, as we learned this week, to harness our irises, those pretty rings of multicoloured muscle in our eyes, to reveal our identities to the Olympians of Homeland Security.

We'll each need to earn notoriety first: the FBI's data-sharing proposals, involving an entire suite of biometric data, are directed at catching major criminals and terrorists. The name the Feds gave this project, however, suggests that someone, somewhere, is looking to the future: "server in the sky". This is either a tip of the hat to 80s rock band Doctor and the Medics' only hit or, more likely, a grotesque piece of security-state triumphalism.

Mind you, we are all more than likely to offer up our eyes over the next couple of years to any institution that cares to stare into them. Iris scanning is set to replace the passport and credit card as the preferred method of proving identity. Who wouldn't want to pass through Heathrow in a blink, after all?

But there is something unpleasant about the idea of having one's eyes scanned, and this is not altogether the fault of the film Minority Report's stolen eyeballs scene. It is more to do with our intuition that the eyes are windows on the soul. The human eye is built to be noticed. Simply opening the eyes wider can, with other facial movements, express everything from shock to arousal to doubt. Simple gaze direction conveys emotional meaning. The lateral rectus eye muscle is labelled "amatoris" in early anatomies because lovers use it to direct their flirtatious glances.

Eyes reveal our inner state. It is impossible to control our rate of blinking for any length of time, or the way our pupils wax and wane. When aroused, we blink more often, and our irises dilate. Our eyes, with their bright whites, colourful irises, responsive pupils, brows and lashes, have evolved to communicate and carry meaning.

Nonetheless, given the amount of information they carry, eyes are surprisingly hard to read. We don't count each other's blinks, and we don't press our faces up against each other to study the changes in each other's irises. Of course, we don't have to: we have language - which lets us lie in a way the eyes don't. But liars are easy to spot - aren't they?

Humans have been pack animals for most of their history. When survival depended on cooperation there was little advantage to be had from blatant lying. In a tightknit community, a pathological liar stands to lose too much if they are caught out. Now, things are different. A 65-year-old, Jean Hutchinson, was sent to jail for five years this week. Why? From her secret operations room, accessed through a wardrobe, she had managed to impersonate 76 different people well enough to defraud the British state of £2.4m.

Technology confers anonymity on people far more effectively than it establishes identity. The biometric security market emerged in the US following the passing of two laws. Neither had anything to do with security, the war on terror or other bugaboos. One was the health insurance act of 1996, which made healthcare firms protect their clients' records more carefully; the other, known as Sarbanes-Oxley, was meant to reduce the fiddling of financial records after the collapse of Enron.

The war on terror is a branding exercise. The war on fraud is real. The technology has a long way to go before machines are invented that can scan our eyes for the secrets of our hearts. Still, this is the path we are on. As our machines learn more about us, we are increasingly learning how to hide behind our machines.

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