• Question: How do people get bad eye sight

    Asked by to Kevin, Fiona on 25 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      I’m assuming you’re asking about people who are born with excellent eyesight, but whose eyesight gets worse over time?

      Eye-sight isn’t really any different from any other bit of you and me. We have evolved to survive long enough to have kids and support them for long enough to be independent and survive on their own. So most people are born healthy (or born with really good eyesight to follow your example) and keep that healthiness until they are 30 or so and then things start to go wrong. Of course for most of us things go wrong slowly (thank goodness) but by the age of 50 most people wear glasses.

      So getting bad eyesight is just an inevitable consequence of getting old, as from an evolutionary perspective we’re not supposed live this long.

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