Color Blindness Advantages, What Drives Color Range?
Advantages Of Color Blindness
A short article in the October issue of Discover explains that sometimes being color blind isn’t a bad thing. Color-blind capuchins (a species of monkey native to S. America) were found to be more successful at hunting camouflaged insects than capuchins with wide color vision. One hypothesis is that color-blindness actually helps improve the ability to detect differences in texture and brightness, thereby better identifying camouflaged insects. As a hobbyist artist, I find that black and white photos sometimes show me more than a full color photo, especially looking for differences in contrast or brightness – sometimes full color sends too many signals to the brain.
So, in addition to possible extraterrestrials that perceive only or primarily in the UV range (see previous posts tagged “alien senses”) or infrared, some extraterrestrials can see within our range, but may be colorblind compared to the average human. In fact, we are UV-blind (although there are rare cases where humans can see partially into the UV range).
What Drives The Color Range?
Sex and food mainly, and identifying enemies. For example, some researchers believe that the first color vision arose because those who developed the ability to see color were better able to identify ripe fruit. As primates evolved and then improved their ability to see reds and oranges, primates began to develop oranges and reds in their hair and skin (or, more precisely, those few primates with orange or red hair would be more specific. Others and thus more successful at finding ripe fruit. favored by primates).
Color Tracking, Sports And Church
Interestingly, humans can usually only track three objects at a time, but if the groups of objects are the same color, we can track three groups or sets of objects and thus many items at once – as long as the items are not grouped in more than three color sets (thus, a team uniforms reason). Don’t know what the point of just three is. Why not four or five? But at least our minds can use the “trick” of color to overcome that limitation.
Perhaps humans hunted packs of animals in packs, but also needed to track their human pack leader (“the alpha wolf”). Therefore, team uniforms are very beneficial to the spectator: with the two opposing teams in different colors and the referees in a third color, the spectator can keep track of what is happening better than if everyone wears what they like. No player has the same color scheme as any other player on the field. Sports may not have been an evolutionary pressure to develop this ability to track three sets based on color, but instead an example of how the modern mind takes advantage of the situation.
But if we can answer the question why three, we can identify the conditions necessary for alien species to develop the ability to track four or five (or even just two). The ability to track different elements affects the social, cultural and theological realities of an alien civilization; Think again about three: Humans have trouble keeping track of more than three things at once, and three seems to be a sacred number in our theology – coincidence? For aliens who can easily keep track of four elements at once, four may be their usual sacred number. And they can have games with three teams at a time.
