Tag Archives: Anglia Ruskin

good to be colour blind

Colour blindness is mainly a male affliction. Something like 8% of all men in the world are colour blind though, as I have mentioned before, this doesn’t mean that they cannot see colour but, rather, means that their colour discrimination is not as good as that of so-called normal observers (the rest of us, in common vernacular). See my earlier post. So we normally think of colour blindness as being something undesirable, something that ideally we would like to be able to cure.

Interesting then that new research at Anglia Ruskin University has suggested that colour blindness may even be an advantage. The study was led by Dr Andrew Smith and showed that colour-blind monkeys (tamarins, to be exact) were better than their ‘normal’ counter-parts at catching camouflaged insects (such as crickets). I guess what this means is that the camouflage is designed (I guess I should say, has evolved) to be effective when viewed by normal tamarins. So the colour-blind tamarins may be better off in some sense.

Dr Smith is also quoted as saying that there is some evidence that, in humans, dichromats (who have two classes of cone rather than three) may see better in dim light than trichromats. For further information see http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/academia-a-research/13403-colour-blind-monkeys-have-advantage-in-catching-camouflaged-prey.