Chris at Mixing Memory kicks around the story that was reported in the media as “scientists find women are born liking pink better! so get back in the kitchen” and finds that the reports of the findings were off. By a lot. In essence, when given something like a spectrum, men and women showed basically the same color preferences on average, but women liked things on the red side of the spectrum just a little more. There’s some science mumbo-jumbo, but Chris does what he’s so good at and summarizes for those of us who don’t have his training:
Interpretations? Both men and women like blueish colors more than yellowish ones, while only Chinese women prefer reddish ones to greenish (while British men seem to dig the greenish colors)…..
Not inconsistent with this… story, is an earlier finding by Bimler et al. that women are better at making distinctions on the red-green dimension. Bimler et al.(2) gave participants three colors at a time, and asked them to selected the color that didn’t go with the other two. Using this task you can figure out how good people are at discriminating colors by looking at the distance (on the color spectrum) they need to distinguish between two colors (and thus pick one of the two out as the one that doesn’t belong). And for colors on the red-green axis, their female participants were better discriminators than the males.
In a sense, then, it seems as though women might just have better color vision than men, a hypothesis further supported by the fact that the vast majority of individuals with color blindness are male, with the majority of those being red-green color blind in some way. This could be a result of women’s role as gatherers back in the Pleistocene, or it could be a result of the fact that the genes responsible for color vision seem to be on the X chromosome. Who knows? I suppose it doesn’t bode well for the women-as-gatherers hypothesis that they prefer blue to yellow (with the British females actually preferring it more than the British males), what with their needing to find the yellow fruit and all.
It’s extremely telling that the reported interpretation is the “women are born to shop and make babies” hypothesis instead of the more boring (but seems to me slightly more likely) hypothesis that the XY chromosome combination (which can leave men colorblind and going bald, amongst other little blips in the system) just has another downside for men, in that they have, on average, less color perception. Maybe.
The issue here is not feminists denying that gender differences exist or even that they’re significant (pregnancy and male pattern baldness strike me as significant differences, for instance), it’s that every goddamn study that comes out that points to a possible gender difference is interpreted in the media as just more evidence that women were born to serve, that we evolved to pick berries (shop, cook, clean) and haul babies around, while men evolved to go out into the world and do important-sounding and conveniently better paid work. If women can indeed see color better than men on average, that’s an interesting fact but not really relevant to anything, but it’s reported to fit this armchair evolutionary psychology scheme where women always, always end up in a servile role. No gender differences are about simple accidents of nature—nope, in the media, everything goes back to these set-in-stone caveman days where women waited on men, our nature inborn that can’t be changed.
Of course, if the story was just, “Women see colors on average better than men,” then the spin would probably be something like, “Women were born to do all the housework and interior decorating,” or something like that.
From Scott, I found this amusing post by Kay Steiger where she smacks down Laura Sessions “Hold Your Knees Together, Ladies” Stepp for peddling the tired stereotype about how women are gabby bitches and men are action-centered stoics.
Social scientists are realizing that while talking may strengthen female friendships and leave pals feeling temporarily better, it can also lead to increased anxiety and depression if perspective and problem-solving aren’t included rather quickly. And what about the husband who listens every night to his wife complain about her job, then one morning at breakfast offers her steps to get out of her funk? Perhaps he deserves credit rather than having a cup of coffee thrown at him.
The stereotype that women just want someone to hear them and men are action-oriented, particularly based around the “Mars and Venus” situation where a woman can’t get her husband to just shut up and listen, fascinates me. Gray does suggest to men who can’t listen without offering a million suggestions to practice a little sympathy, but to even get that bit of advice in, the whole situation has to be cast in this air of, “Silly women just don’t understand that problems are fixing, like us far-smarter, more stoic men understand.”
It fascinates me in no small part because it takes me—a woman, mind you—a lot of effort to listen to someone else vent without immediately feeling like I have to offer solutions. I didn’t need John Gray to tell me this was just an offshoot of my generally superior personality or that I need to condescend, though, because I took “be a more passive/sympathetic listener” onto myself as a duty, especially with boyfriends. Because the nodding and hugging woman who quietly listens to a man’s problems is a given, and if I don’t provide that to boyfriends, I’m failing in a pretty basic duty.* But because it goes without saying that men are entitled to a woman playing sounding board for his frustrations, it goes unnoticed that men are not especially action-oriented all the time. Fro men, those times you come home to bitch and moan to your wife or girlfriend about some work frustration that you can’t immediately change is not remarkable, and your entitlement to it is not noteworthy enough to be dragged out and prescribed as some sort of weakness that has to be analyzed and occasionally coddled by an indulgent spouse.
It does show why the Mars and Venus books really banked on this advice, though, especially with those wed to their assigned gender roles. Good women don’t need to be told that it’s obnoxious to refuse to listen to your husband when he’s got frustrations he simply needs to vent, and that it’s rude to offer solutions that he’s already thought of or that he can’t put into action. But if a woman really gets fed up on being all ears while never getting a little in return, Gray can swoop in and offer this basic advice (boiled down to “act more like a woman”) with a lot of essentialism to make the medicine go down a little.
Anyway, Stepp is full of shit. There’s nothing that women can do that isn’t DANGERDANGERDANGER. Reject your assigned gender role and have lots of sex? DANGER. Fulfill it and spend all your time on the phone talking to your mom and your friends about your problems? DANGER. I predict strongly a full career for her of pointing out the various ways women put themselves in danger by existing while female.
*I actually think this is basic, but it should be for everyone, not just women.
47 Responses to “Today’s essentialism smackdown”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
OMG! According to this post, I am the ultimate Danger Girl.
Well, it just goes to show you: Men are from Omicron Persei VII, women are from Omicron Persei IX.
FWIW I think your (and Chris’s) interpretation is correct. It’s anecdotal, to be sure, but in my experience the best graphic artists I’ve ever worked with are women. In terms of creativity they seem on par with men, but in terms of getting the colors right and pulling out subtleties of hue that most men can’t see or don’t bother to find, women just seem better.
Dan Margulis explores this somewhat in his graphic-geek text Photoshop LAB Color, which discusses, among other things, how to subtly tweak the A and B color channels in the bizarre LAB colorspace to add richness and depth of tone that’s almost miraculous to see. I’ve been using it since I learned about it, and it makes an unbelievable difference in the final product.
So I guess I see like a girl, in addition to reading like one (and, of course, throwing like one, at least according to my long-departed sixth-grade peers). I’m wondering why that’s seen, by some, as an insult.
If you’re at all moved by evolutionary psychology, it’s worth noting that a lot of red/green color-deficient men seem able to pick out the colors and body-shapes of game animals against background colors much more effectively than men who are more mundanely capable of seeing the broader spectrum clearly. This might help explain why the color “deficiency” trait has persisted.
Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth (most likely in the Horn of Africa, on or near the coast). Get used to it.
Funny how the biological ability to better distinguish color doesn’t lead people to automatically think that women would be better pilots, graphic designers, artists, animators, or any other respected (and potentially well-paying) occupation in which a good sense of color distinction would be a plus.
Warren Actually, I’d bet its not an evolutionary advantage at all, but just the fact that the X chromosome is physically longer than the Y chromosome. That’s why us men get “male” pattern baldness so much more frequently than women do. The gene for it is on a part of the X chromosome that has no corresponding point on the Y chromosome becuase the Y chromosome is too short. It’s got nothing to do with there being any evolutionary advantage for bald men.
The fact is that all sorts of stuff that has no particular advantage, and even some stuff that has a distinct disadvantage survives either because it piggybacks with an advantage, or it just isn’t disadvantagous enough to affect breeding. Look at white skin as the classic example. There’s absolutely no advantage to it, and it does convey a minor disadvantage [1], but thanks to the founder effect it spread throughout most of Europe. People tried for decades to find an evolutionary advantage to pale skin and there just isn’t one. Sometimes traits just stick around.
Of course, one does wonder what would happen if we weren’t developing genetic engineering to correct some things. I read an article where it was stated that the Y chromosome was continuing to grow shorter, and would (in a few million years) eventually result in no more human males being born, and (naturally) the species going extinct. Of course, we’re already close to being able to patch our genes, so by the time it becomes a real problem it’ll doubtless be trivial to fix.
[1] Minor, because from an evolutionary standpoint it simply doesn’t matter if you die of skin cancer at age 30, that’s past prime breeding age and breeding is *ALL* your genes “care” about.
I’m colorblind as hell. I nearly died of boredom at an impressionist art show once.
“hey. it’s kind of like a house. only muddy. oh look. muddy trees. lighter tone. god it all looks like baby shit…”
Brad:
Maybe it’s an example of a benign variation. If it generally is true, though, that a red/green “colorblind” man can see, say, a deer or rabbit more clearly, well, it’s interesting to think about.
Chris’s comment about enhanced blue making it harder to see ripe yellow fruit led me to do a quick hack of a picture of some bananas. The “correct” image shows them as they are in situ; the modified image might serve to illustrate (granted, in an exaggerated way) how both an enhanced perception of color richness, coupled with a tendency to see blue more completely, could make the bananas look.
The ripe ones are obvious; they have a lot of saturation, and stand out quite clearly against the unripe fruit, as well as in contrast to the rest of the tree and even the rocks at the base of the plant.*
Now imagine a forest full of darkish green shapes, almost purple bark … and “bright yellow fruit” standing out like they’re sprayed in Day-Glo. A preference for blue doesn’t necessarily translate into a dimming of other colors; in fact, it has quite the opposite effect.
I’m not, FWIW, trying to show any kind of support for anyone’s hypothesis here; but when we discuss how we perceive colors, it’s sometimes pretty useful to have a visual example to study.
====
* This was done by switching to LAB in Photoshop, enhancing the A and B curves, then tweaking the B curve just a little more to exaggerate the blue.
I’m probably a bit more sympathetic to the concept of evolutionary bio than most of the crowd here.
But… it does seem that this stuff should be presented as “here are some things that we think are holdovers from ancient human behaviors. It may have worked fine in the savanna, but it is some seriously maladaptive shit in the modern world. If you catch yourself going down these paths, you should probably do some serious self-evaluation to see if you can’t find a better way of dealing with the world. ”
Instead of… “Who hoo! They say cavemen did this, so that means nobody can call me an asshole when I do it!”
I just blogged about that color study this weekend:
http://tanglethis.wordpress.com/2007/08/25/cerulean-colored-glasses/
I was mostly annoyed that the speculation immediately went to “The (mild) discrepancy is due to our hunting and gathering ancestors!” and not “We *currently* socialize boys to identify with blue and girls to identify with pink at a young age, so that accounts for some of it.” I completely agree that theories about sexual difference in vision are only pulled out to reinforce existing patterns. Men are forever telling me that they are “more visual” than women, but they sure aren’t talking about art school or decorating.
Furthermore, I was playing around and found a color psychology test online. I played once as female and once as male… and got rather different interpretations of my character. Female = defensive, male = aggressive.
Actually Brad, the pale skin allows the pale polar people to absorb enough sunlight to synthesize enough vitamin D to live. Equatorial people get much more sunlight, so they didn’t need that adaptation.
Hey, Brad:
I did another image, this of a cottontail (same page as the banana one ref’d above), significantly muting the red/green spectrum. To my eye the rabbit doesn’t really stand out that sharply against its background, so maybe the claims that game animals are “easier to see” for color-deficient men aren’t so valid after all.
The most striking difference is that the rabbit’s fur seems to have become grey, losing its brown highlights, though maybe its outline is a little more obvious in the “color deficient” version.
So yeah, maybe it really is just a benign variation, something that exists (as you point out) because of the Y chromosome’s weirdnesses, not because of any evolutionary advantage.
Breeding isn’t the only thing your genes care about - it’s the successful survival of your offspring. If you spend 30-80 raising the survival rates of your descendants, eventually, the more long-living population will become dominant
Well, color blindness= prey spotting is something that’s been talked a lot about in animals, rightly or wrongly.
But there’s no doubt about women being more gifted than men with color. Everyone has 3 kinds of color receptors in their retina, right? Wrong. Some men, the colorblind ones, have 2. ANd some women have 4 types!
In exchange, I got 5 wisdom teeth and my sister only has 3.
personally, i thought the money spent on a study to prove “oxygen is essential to survival of man” was sad annoying, but at least it had science behind it.
brother!
Samantha:
With predators in general, yeah, you’re right; though IIRC visual acuity is much more important, particularly the ability to perceive motion against a static background.
We can simulate this effect pretty readily just by going to a moderately-busy, open space (say, a sparsely-populated public park) and staring fixedly at one point for a long time. You’ll notice the visual field, after a while, fades to a uniform grey … except where there’s motion. You see that right away. How handy for any predator that simply stares fixedly off into space for a while … and then pounces.
And, as you’re well aware, this totally ignores octarine.
FWIW, I added a few final images of apples, strawberries and oranges, just to sort of drive home the idea that a heightened perception of blue does not in any way reduce the plausibility of finding ripe fruit; it has precisely the opposite effect.
Amanda-
On point.
You are DANGEROUS.
xoxo
I’m probably a bit more sympathetic to the concept of evolutionary bio than most of the crowd here.
Mary, I think you might be confusing evolutionary biology with evolutionary psychology. The latter field is the one that folks here tend to have issues with. A lot of evo psych is used as a flimsy excuse to prop up society’s pre-existing order.
Warren -
Actually, there’s a hypothesis floating around that some small percentage of women is actually physiologically capable of seeing more colors than other men and women.
We have three molecules in the cells of our retinas, each of which detects a different wavelength of light. This is why the colors we perceive can be expressed in terms of how much light of each particular wavelength they contain. Reds stimulate the red-sensing molecule, purples stimulate the red- and blue-sensing molecules, etc. Humans and most primates have trichromatic vision.
Most other mammals have dichromatic vision, or even monochromatic vision. On the other hand, many birds, insects, fish, and reptiles have tetrachromatic vision. They have an extra receptor molecule that responds to a fourth wavelength. In effect, they can see every color we can, plus a bunch of extra ones using that extra wavelength.
Since two of the genes for the color receptors are believed to be on the X chromosome (for a total of four genes between the pair), it’s possible that a woman could have a mutation in one of those genes that allowed her to see tetrachromatically, since the presence of another copy on the other chromosome would prevent any loss of function as a result of the mutation.
I was thinking about this before I saw your post, Amanda, and I noticed, too, that none of the coverage talked about male deficiencies in color vision. It would be more accurate to say that the study showed “men like the bluer side of the spectrum more” than “women like the redder side”, because it should be *assumed* that female color vision is the norm from which males deviate.
I haven’t looked at the data, so I don’t know if the male-female difference is due to a subpopulation of males being *very* color vision-deficient, or if there’s a really a difference between “normal” males and females.
Putting on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat, I am reluctant to suppose that color-vision-deficiency is actively beneficial. My gut reaction is that males (in some human populations, but I don’t know how the trait varies between populations) are not as strongly selected *for* good color vision as females are.
My husband has mild red-green color blindness, and I have never detected it giving him any advantage. Indeed, his difficulty telling a red stoplight from a green one at night could easily become a very great disadvantage indeed.
Indy:
Would you mind looking over the pics I uploaded and telling me what, if any, differences you perceive? I’m especially interested in knowing which of the paired photos seems more natural in color to you. Thanks.
And you know, anyone else interested, please do the same, whether you’re color-deficient, an art director or just bored. Please indicate gender and age, though, as well as any relevant social or demographic histories you might think worth mentioning; and, if you can, why you prefer one image over the other. I’ll keep everything anonymous unless you explicitly declare your permission otherwise.
This could end up a blog entry over at my dump, eventually, and in any case might affect how I generate graphics in the future, so rather than clutter Amanda’s airwaves, email me directly with your comments.
Tanglethis:
It probably accounts for most of it. What color is Barbie world? And isn’t it interesting that, even with the sound off, you can tell by a TV movie trailer whether the movie advertised is a “chick flick” or a boys-only action/adventure romp? It’s not just the soft lighting or action scenes; it’s also the entire color cast that tends to imbue the images.
Though the demographics do blur. Consider the hyperbright colors of PowerPuff Girls versus Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy; then consider that GA runs at least as many “girly” advertisements for toys as it does “boy-y” ones.
No, just the usual preference for pink. Of the naughtier shades.
Overall, yeah, I agree that there’s a lot of social pressure to seeing or “preferring” certain colors. And it is valid to think of it as social. I sincerely doubt, for instance, that the mud huts inhabited by medieval peasants had pink walls for the girls’ nursery, while the boys’ corner was filled with blue.
Which exposes the lie, of course. The idea that color preference is genetically predetermined may have a slim, very slight root in biology; but to me it’s probably not that different from the idea of IQ testing — which is so heavily socially-biased in favor of the dominant paradigm that it’s nearly impossible to get otherwise-educated people of both genders to admit that it’s really not much of a measure of anything apart from relative success at assimilating into a given culture.
(Imagine how a Maori IQ test might differ from one made in, say, New York City. What would be tested? How would cross-cultural participants fare? I’m quite certain I’d fail at identifying game trails or the ten best places to find water, for example, and thus be regarded as a sub-retarded moron by Maori standards.)
Jeez, I think I’m overcommenting here. I don’t mean to. It’s just that, for the second time in a week, Amanda managed to post on a topic that matters to me. Sorry if I’ve seemed too loud; slap me down if I need it. But dang it, this is interesting.
(BTW, Samantha, I talked over your comments about our ads with The Powers That Be. They were all as affected as I was by your insight, and agree that we need to change focus a little. Thanks again for your willingness to be open about the issues I raised, and believe me when I say they will make a difference to a lot of people.)
I’m with syfr, light skin is moderately advantageous in polar climes and dark skin is advantageous in equatorial climes, which is why skin color tends to vary with latitude.
While death from skin cancer may not keep you from reproducing, it would reduce your ability to care for your kids and grandkids. Hell, severe sunburn might even keep you from mating. (Don’t touch me there!)
Blonde and red hair or blue and green eyes may well persist through sexual selection, and it may be true that blondes have more fun.
Proof that us Old World primates ought to have stayed put in the tropics is our inability to synthesize vitamin C, a deficiency that would quickly fell a carnivore, for example, but that hardly mattered to creatures that lived in the trees and ate fresh fruit all year long.
Once we decamped from the jungle of Eden and dispersed into the plains and forests of Asia and Europe life became much more difficult.
Xerxes1729:
I’d heard of that; by octarine I was referring to the works of Terry Pratchett. In that context the handle “Samantha Vimes” is not a coincidence.
But thanks for the comment. (And lest we forget, bees can see ultraviolet.)
(I have a pretty damn long post here that’s in mod currently; hopefully, when it’s cleared, it’ll explain more.)
I’ve had a couple of male friends who, while not color blind, had some trouble distinguishing yellow and green. One actually disputed the color of a colleague’s new car, and she asked me to adjudicate the dispute. I said it was pea green, which annoyed him (I forget what color he thought it was).
On the other hand, one of these two friends could discourse knowledgeably about the amount of red in various shade of blue, which I couldn’t see for myself, though I could discern the differences. He’d spent some time with the Pantone charts, so perhaps it was more a matter of learning than perception.
Honestly, I am floored that this “study” (i.e. bullshit) has been reported as gospel throughout the news spectrum, including TIME, which has an article along the lines of, “Why Girls Like Pink.”
Every time I think the press cannot be any more hostile to the basics of critical thinking something like this happens.
Miller:
Really? After the last seven years?
I predict strongly a full career for her of pointing out the various ways women put themselves in danger by existing while female.
Hey, you win!
http://abyss2hope.blogspot.com/2007/08/gray-rape-victim-blaming-with-music-and.html
Yes, rape isn’t rape if you drank too much, ladies. I’m sure you never heard that one before.
I’m with syfr, light skin is moderately advantageous in polar climes and dark skin is advantageous in equatorial climes, which is why skin color tends to vary with latitude.
The exception to that are the various peoples who live in arctic regions, who retained their dark(ish) skin because their vitamin D came from animal sources so they didn’t need to develop the adaptation of pale skin to make the most of available sunlight.
In other words, they’re the exceptions that prove the rule.
I played once as female and once as male… and got rather different interpretations of my character. Female = defensive, male = aggressive.
These days I find the term “defensive” quite amusing, since what it means to me is something very different from what others often want it to mean. We have a new boxing ring in our dojo, so now me and my sparring partners are real, genuine kickboxers… and ‘defensive’ skills are those that are some of the most difficult to develop. ‘Aggressive’ is easy enough, since nearly anybody can be aggressive, without thinking of defences. However, ‘defensive’ implies a special kind of coolness of mind: The ability to keep one’s focus whilst attacking or in the heat of being attacked. This really involves higher level reasoning.
Mnemosyne, forgive me, I didn’t see anything in the linked article about skin color (the vitamin C stuff hints at how my ancestors survived, though). The Inuit are pretty light-skinned. Maybe not as fish-belly pale or freckly as I am, but they wouldn’t be mistaken for equatorial types.
I don’t want to argue whether moving away from the equator permits or requires lighter skin. Both, maybe. Moving closer to the equator seems to be another matter. Even the pigmentally challenged among us darken with exposure.
Why, though, are Arabs so light-skinned? They don’t seem to be all that well adapted to their environment. Sure, they compensate by covering themselves up, but one might conjecture either that they haven’t occupied their current environment that long, they compensate sufficiently with their attire and lifestyle, or that they prefer light-skinned mates.
(Sorry about the 3-valued EITHER, my first language was FORTRAN IV: GOD is real, unless declared integer.)
In my happy, tolerant, sun-drenched Southern California beach town, every day I see women wearing the hijab, covering their hair and necks and part of their cheeks, and I have to wonder why they leave their faces exposed to the sun. I wear a hat, why don’t they?
Whenever I look at the kids on the beach my wonderment forks between [why does a child need a bikini top] and [why don’t their parents worry about ultraviolet radiation].
I’ll hazard a guess that if you spend a few tens of thousands of years in the tropics, you adapt by turning very dark so that you can run around nearly naked with impunity, because clothes are insupportable in that climate. Elsewhere dress is more a matter of fashion.
I am so tired of August. I want my jacket back.
And just for the hell of it, because this subject doesn’t show up as often as it should, one of the reasons we (for some value of ‘we’) value light skin is that it’s a marker for people who don’t have to labor outdoors.
Nowadays a tan is a mark of leisure, but paleness was for centuries a rare and desirable trait.
Bad Jim I’m not a biologist, though I do consider myself to be moderately well educated on the field for a layman. I’m fairly sure that I read somewhere that the whole vitamin D idea was rejected a while back.
Among other things black folks don’t suffer from any particular vitamin D deficiency when living further away from the equator. White skin is a disadvantage no matter how you cut it. Though, in my experience black skin doesn’t provide nearly as much protection against sunburn as popular (white) mythology holds. My wife (who is about the color of Hershey’s milk chocolate) gets sunburned less than I do, but not by a huge amount, and I’m fish belly white.
black folks don’t suffer from any particular vitamin D deficiency when living further away from the equator
Not these days, but IIRC dark-skinned Americans in the northern states used to have a notably high incidence of rickets (=vitamin D deficiency), and it still shows up occasionally in lactose-intolerant black children who don’t take supplements.
I’ve always heard that the rods and cones crowd each other out - if you have more rods, you have better grayscale vision, if you have more cones you have better color vision. The notion that more rods would be “selected for” in males because of the need to hunt vs cones for gathering in females kind of overlooks the fact that better-detailed grayscale vision is also helpful in not stepping into holes in the ground, not getting jumped by predators, trampled by wildebeests, or clotheslined on vines - all of which are pretty gender-neutral priorities if you’re out there wandering through the forest or savannah.
OTOH, in terms of how well people see things to function in the world, then or now - not getting run over, finding your wallet, noticing when the light changes - the difference between men and women is far less than the difference between individuals. And unless there’s extreme colorblindness, anyone can be taught to perceive subtle differences and shades - all it takes is some good painting classes, and ISTR that many, many realistic painters in colors throughout history were male - which, you know, would hardly be possible if there were any major biological difference. You’d look at a Dutch Master and go “why is it all gray?” instead of “wow, look at the subtle range of blues in that porcelain! Those tulips are like a rainbow!”
If anything was going to be selected out in prehistory for survival advantages it would be myopia - but alas, it still is with us, and damned expensive too.
OT - there is literally nothing a woman can’t be blamed for, part umpteen-zillion…
I’ve always heard that the rods and cones crowd each other out - if you have more rods, you have better grayscale vision, if you have more cones you have better color vision. The notion that more rods would be “selected for” in males because of the need to hunt vs cones for gathering in females kind of overlooks the fact that better-detailed grayscale vision is also helpful in not stepping into holes in the ground, not getting jumped by predators, trampled by wildebeests, or clotheslined on vines - all of which are pretty gender-neutral priorities if you’re out there wandering through the forest or savannah.
OTOH, in terms of how well people see things to function in the world, then or now - not getting run over, finding your wallet, noticing when the light changes - the difference between men and women is far less than the difference between individuals. And unless there’s extreme colorblindness, anyone can be taught to perceive subtle differences and shades - all it takes is some good painting classes, and ISTR that many, many realistic painters in colors throughout history were male - which, you know, would hardly be possible if there were any major biological difference. You’d look at a Dutch Master and go “why is it all gray?” instead of “wow, look at the subtle range of blues in that porcelain! Those tulips are like a rainbow!”
If anything was going to be selected out in prehistory for survival advantages it would be myopia - but alas, it still is with us, and damned expensive too.
OT - there is literally nothing a woman can’t be blamed for, part umpteen-zillion…
bad jim, (quoting from memory a SciAm article I linked to before,) adaption to sunlight gets counteracted by everything that reduces the effects of sunlight or artificially fixes vitamin balance. Protecting oneself from the sun by keeping fully covered or taking folic acid negates the reproductive disadvantages of pale-skinned people under strong sunlight. Same with vitamin D supplements for dark-skinned folks in high latitudes.
(Dang, the time out of the anti-spam measure is shorter than what my computer needs to build up this page…)
Brad Jackson, I’m fairly sure that I read somewhere that the whole vitamin D idea was rejected a while back.
Do you have a link to that? The paper I like to refer to was published in 2000, so it might well be out-dated, but I haven’t discovered anything newer on the topic in my usual reads.
Mnemosyne, forgive me, I didn’t see anything in the linked article about skin color (the vitamin C stuff hints at how my ancestors survived, though). The Inuit are pretty light-skinned. Maybe not as fish-belly pale or freckly as I am, but they wouldn’t be mistaken for equatorial types.
They also wouldn’t be mistaken for Swedes or Norwegians, which is what most people think of when they’re thinking of light-skinned northern Europeans. When I talk about “light-skinned” people, I’m talking about blond, blue-eyed people with light skin, or redheads with pale skin.
If your definition of “light-skinned” includes Mediterranean people from southern Italy, Spain, or Greece then, yes, by your definition, the Inuit and similar peoples are “pretty light-skinned.” When comparing them to other northern peoples like the Scandinavians, though, they’re distinctly darker.
Please note that in this discussion of “light-skinned” and “dark-skinned,” I am not making any value judgement whatsoever on which color of skin is “better” to have, or if people with one skin color are “better” than another. We’re talking about how humans adapted to the environments they found themselves in over the millions of years that we developed. Nothing more.
And you should probably let the National Institutes of Health know that they’re spreading misinformation when they advise dark-skinned people living in northern states to take vitamin D supplements. I, too, would be interested in seeing journal articles refuting those studies.
It is probably worth noting that not all traits carried down from the distant past conferred biological or reproductive advantage- if a trait isn’t actively harmful, there’s no reason for it to be selected out of the gene pool. Which means that these variations in color vision, fascinating as they may be, don’t necessarily indicate that the possessors of one trait over another had any advantages; only that the trait didn’t stop them from making babies.
Apologies if someone else already said this, but:
Brad, the Y chromosome isn’t just a shorter version of the X chromosome with some information left out. The Y chromosome contains hormone production genes to trigger male fetus development, and some others that are used in sperm production. That’s it.
That means any gene on a male’s X chromosome will be unmatched on the Y chromosome. Hence the load of recessive genes that express far more often in males. (MPB, red-green colorblindness, etc.)
I’m coming in totally late to this party after a long absence, but Warren, i just wanted to say your final picture made my afternoon.
What has not been mentioned yet, it the fact that, until recently, Red not Blue was seen as the masculine (and pink is just a faded red). Red was seen as a stronger color, the color of blood, the color of Mars - the God of Wa. Blue was a softer color, the color of water, often seen as female. That is why you always see Mary dressed in blue.
Among other things black folks don’t suffer from any particular vitamin D deficiency when living further away from the equator.
Which black folk under which circumstances? Seafood is a source of vitamin D; people with a heavy seafood diet have less selective pressure for fairer skin. It’s the darker skinned away from the coast that would suffer the most.
And I suspect that you’re wrong about the benefits of black skin in evolutionary terms. Granted, it is not a fool-proof or perhaps even a great protection from the sun, but it is *some* protection, and the problem would have been ongoing for pre-industrial peoples. There would have been a continual selective pressure against fair skin for people in the tropics.
Among other things black folks don’t suffer from any particular vitamin D deficiency when living further away from the equator.
Which black folk under which circumstances? Seafood is a source of vitamin D; people with a heavy seafood diet have less selective pressure for fairer skin. It’s the darker skinned away from the coast that would suffer the most.
And I suspect that you’re wrong about the benefits of black skin in evolutionary terms. Granted, it is not a fool-proof or perhaps even a great protection from the sun, but it is *some* protection, and the problem would have been ongoing for pre-industrial peoples. There would have been a continual selective pressure against fair skin for people in the tropics.
Just sticking my head up here to say that my boyfriend and I seem to see colors identically; i.e. that when one of us sees a car, frex, we agree on what color to call it. And this isn’t just “blue”, but “yellowy-gray gold” or “cyan” or differeing between “blue” and indigo”
Given that his brother is color-blind (red-green), this is all the more amazing.
I vaguely remember having heard that there are 16 different alleles for color vision and the variation is all over the lot. As a friend of mine said: “Some people have more crayons in their box.”
inge: Apparently I was either misremembering or what I read was incorrect. I’ve been looking for a cite on what I said and I can’t find it. Everything I have found during my search this time says that I’m wrong and that white skin does give a noticable advantage in vitamin D production. It also says that during our hairy phase we most likely had pale skin and developed dark skin to avoid foliate deficiencies.
PhoenicianRomans You are correct, I was wrong about the evolutionary benefits of dark skin and light skin.