Colour is in the eye of the beholder

Guest: jam (619 days ago)

colour is on a wheel, (i.e. green = blue plus yellow, etc). Colour is actually on a linear spectrum, not a wheel. The two are incompatible. This is basically the same effect - our colour vision is a construct.

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Guest:  (623 days ago)

Maybe the entire tribe is color blind.

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Guest: John (621 days ago)

Why not, there's a whole tribe of 300m in the USA that can't spell "colour" correctly.

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Guest: TinyNads (623 days ago)

And are we all colourblind when we cannot easily distinguish between the two green colours that they can distinguish quite easily? I think the point of the two experiments removes a colour blind gene possibility from the equation. Real colourblind people have the language, but still cannot distinguish certain colours easily. I think what is being suggested is that due to the words we use for different colours, the brain developes to differentiate those colours from each other. The brains of the Namibian tribe have developed to emphasise different boundaries to differentiate the colours that their language describes. What an interesting subject!

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Guest: BaffledBiologist (623 days ago)

Interesting - But they may have the correlation exactly the wrong way round. If the Himba have a different genetic history from those of us in the west, then they may not have the same colour perception due to spectrum sensitive cones in the eye. This means that they may physically be unable to distinguish easily between certain colours. If that is the case, then they will have developed less words for the colours that they can see. Not the limited vocabulary meaning that they cannot see the difference - But the limited difference means a limited vocabulary.

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Guest:  (623 days ago)

I agree totally. You're hypothesis seems far simpler and therefore far more likely (Occam's razor)

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Guest:  (88 days ago)

Agreed!

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Guest:  (622 days ago)

I couldn't see the different green one at all, but I did see 3 nipples during the documentary! RESULT

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Guest: Bollo (623 days ago)

It sucks that you have to watch an ad just to add a comment or vote in the polls.

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Guest: Kamikaze (623 days ago)

It could be cultural as well...for a tribe that depends greatly on hunting, for example, being able to distinguish varying shades of what we call "green" is highlyuseful, so their descriptions of colour would reflect that. A follow-up test to this would be to "adopt" a Himba infant and do the same tests 5 years later...this would rule out the genetics element.

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Guest: Stevovo1980 (22 days ago)

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