The cockeyed squid lives in the ocean’s “twilight zone” where sunlight barely filters through the increasingly deep waters. The squid’s nickname is a reference to its two extremely different eyes: the left eye develops over time to become considerably larger than the right—almost twice as big. Scientists studying the mollusk have deduced that the squid uses its right eye, the smaller one, to look down into the darker depths. The larger, left eye, gazes upward, toward the sunlight.

The squid is an unlikely depiction of what it means to live in our present world and also in the future certainty we…