Sensory acuity in mammals and measurement theory

That should be enough key words to attract the fans of Hayek and the Sensory Order.

What I want is the optimum match between sensory acuity and good stuff in the environment, what is the best visual acuity to find good stuff. I am going to use the cow herd as my example, they run a pretty good economy.

In a perfect equilibrium between the cow and its environment, the cow would be optimally designed to measure threats, food, and babes. What is an optimal measurement design? Well we are back to Nyquist and information theory. What is the cheapest way to observe a water hole in the standard cow environment? For vision, we want the median water hole, at the median distance to be defocused on the cow retina such that the pond image occupies four adjacent retinal cones. (Sample at twice the resolution of the good stuff in two dimensions) We get the maximum information flow at the cheapest cost when using Nyquist.

When evolution defocuses that pond onto the cow retina, the blur overlaps onto adjacent retinal cells, adding noise, correlation noise. So, we get an inherent contradiction, there cannot be a perfect equilibrium, the system must defocus to observe relative structure. In a perfect focus, water would always appear as a point of light, impossible to drink.

Bringing up the point, how much noise? Well, its that inflection point on the Bell shaped curve. When nature has the edge of the median pond appearing as the inflection point of a bell shaped image on the cow's eye, then bingo, right on.

In the end, there should be a straight theoretical connection between a cow finding water and Ben finding Treasury yields.