TIL about Tetrachromacy, a condition which lets you see more colors. Normal people can see about 1 million colors, while tetrachromats may see up to 100 million. Up to 12% of women may have it.
Tetrachromacy is a rare eye condition that allows for increased color vision. We’ll tell you about what causes it and how it’s diagnosed, as well as why you need to be skeptical of online tests.
And red/green color blindness isn't less colors, you get more shades of brown.
Which sounds shitty, but invaluable for hunters.
My dad legitimately didn't know what other people saw for "red" but he could spot a deer in the middle of the woods like it was neon yellow.
I believe the downside to tetracheomacy is less rods because the extra cones are taking up more space. Which I think translates to really bad night vision.
There's very few things that are a flat negative evolutionarily.
Like sickle cell, in most of the world it's a significant disease. But if you live somewhere with malaria before modern medicine, then for 99.9999% of human existence, you'd be dead at a young age without sickle cell in those places.
Or how appendix bursting was worth the risk of retaining gut bacteria. Once we got clean water, the adaption of not having an appendix started to spread. Until modern surgery took out the negative evolutionary pressure so humans will be stuck with appendixes for ever now.
I'm heterozygous for cystic fibrosis. It fucked my plans for having kids, cause I don't have vas deferens. (Most people who are heterozygous don't have any problems, but some men do with fertility). But apparently heterozygous people are more resistant to cholera and dysentery, since our cells hold onto water easier.
According to wikipedia, tetrachromacy is caused by having having both normal vision and red-green color blind genes in different chromosomes, so some of the red or green cones end up being receptive to a wavelength between red and green. Rods don't sound affected.
Health line article doesn't mention the wavelength. Got me excited that it was infrared or something
That's fun!! I am not color blind and was able with a lot of work to sort of see some of them. The easiest is the second one just squint and unfocus if you wanna try. The first one I couldn't get to work at all though