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‘Efficient coding theory’ describes the most perfect, low-energy way to design a light-detecting device for a future camera or prosthetic retina. Or you could just look at a mammalian retina that’s already organized this way. In a pair of papers on retinal structure, a team of neurobiologists has shown that the rigors of natural selection and evolution shaped our retinas to capture noisy data just as this theory of optimization would prescribe.