High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The evolution of the eye has been a subject of significant study, as a distinctive example of a homologous organ present in a wide variety of taxa. Certain components of the eye, such as the visual pigments, appear to have a common ancestry: that is, they evolved once, before the animals radiated. However, complex, image-forming eyes evolved some 50 to 100 times – using many of the same proteins and genetic toolkits in their construction.