8. COLOR VISION - Harvard University（8。）.pdf

8. COLOR VISION The hundreds of dollars extra that consumers are willing to pay for color TV in preference to black and white must mean that we take our color sense seriously. A complex apparatus in the eye and brain can discriminate the differences in wavelength content of the things we see, and the advantages of this ability to our ancestors are easy to imagine. One advantage must surely have been the ability to defeat the attempts of other animals to camouflage themselves: it is much harder for a hunted animal to blend in with the surroundings if its predator can discriminate the wavelength as well as the intensity of light. Color must also be important in finding plant food: a bright red berry standing out against green foliage is easily found by a monkey, to his obvious advantage and presumably to the plants, since the seeds pass unharmed through the monkeys digestive tract and are widely scattered. In some animals color is important in reproduction; examples include the bright red coloration of the perineal region of macaque monkeys and the marvelous plumage of many male birds. Color serves many purposes in nature, some of which are still mysterious. The blue spots on this Garibaldi fish fade as it grows older, disappering when it matures. What significance they have for older Garibaldi fish is not known. In humans, evolutionary pressure to preserve or improve color vision would seem to be relaxing, at least to judge from the 7 or 8 percent of human males who are relatively or 1 completely deficient in color vision but who seem to get along quite well, with their deficit often undiagnosed for years, only to be picked up when they run through red lights. Even those of us who have normal color vision can fully enjoy black-and-white movies, some of which are artistically the best ever made. As I will discuss later, we are all color-blind