Gordon Lynn Walls

Gordon Lynn Walls (April 4, 1905 – August 22, 1962) was an American professor of physiological optics and optometry at the University of California, Berkeley Walls started his education at Boston English High School.

His first studies dealt with photomechanical changes in the retina, laying the fundaments of his career in vision.

His interest in vision was confirmed during a four-year research associateship in ophthalmology at Wayne University College of Medicine and culminated with the publication in 1942 of his book The Vertebrate Eye and its Adaptive Radiation.

He described the nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis which states that placental mammals were mainly or even exclusively nocturnal through most of their evolutionary story, starting with their origin 225 million years ago, and only ending with the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

[2] In 1958 Walls wrote a chapter in The eye in evolution, the first volume (780 pages) of Stewart Duke-Elder's work System of Ophthalmology, a monumental multivolume contribution to medical literature.