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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?
osigurdson wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
>> Plant leaves, for example, reflect green light even if there are no
eyes to see it
It seems that the logical colour for a leaf would be completely black -
absorbing all energy. Fortunately that isn't how it worked out.
hoseja wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
Under a thick canopy it basically is like that.
firesteelrain wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
Well then leaves would get too hot and plants canât absorb
unlimited sun
They need to absorb red and blue light
osigurdson wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
Right but Dyson sphere isn't green I don't think.
justonceokay wrote 7 min ago:
To be fair unlike the Dyson sphere, leaves actually exist
vanderZwan wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
> They have evolved even in species that donât have color vision,
likely because their predators do.
I mean, that shouldn't be too surprising since plants don't have vision
at all and still evolved colors.
wtcactus wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
A very interesting tidbit of information Iâve only learned/realized
when I was already an adult, is that many otherwise plain flowers have
really intricate patterns in the ultraviolet, since some insects see in
that spectrum.
abc_lisper wrote 18 hours 29 min ago:
Did they purposely ignore dinosaurs? Feathered dinosaurs are known to
be colorful [1] Hard to believe their claim fish are the first to
evolve color for mating displays 100 million years ago.
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/chinese-rainbow-dinosaur...
ethan_smith wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
The article likely distinguishes between simply having colors versus
evolving colors specifically for sexual selection - fossil evidence
can show dinosaur coloration but determining behavioral purpose is
much harder than observing living fish species.
stronglikedan wrote 16 hours 1 min ago:
> Feathered dinosaurs are known to be colorful
Perhaps because it's not truly known.
> The discovery "suggests a more colourful Jurassic World than we
previously imagined,"
-- from your link
timewizard wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
Bacteria can be colorful. It can also fluoresce.
My blood is red because it has iron in it not because there's an
evolutionary link to my eyesight.
awhitby wrote 15 hours 25 min ago:
You're very likely right there's no causation in that direction,
but it seems entirely possible that we experience red as a vivid
color in part because noticing blood is evolutionarily important.
citizenpaul wrote 19 hours 10 min ago:
One of the most disturbingly creepy things I've realized is when
looking at render of a laser scanned environment. The oddly bumpy and
uneven gray mass that everything show up as. That is actually reality.
The filtered colorful smooth version we see is an arbitrary specific
wavelength interpretation that our brains developed. We are actually
living in that creepy gray horror movie render of the laser scan.
npteljes wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
In a way, you are on the right track, but the conclusion is
different. What we live is far from gray, rather it's unfathomably
more "colorful" and chaotic. We do see just a bit of it and apply a
lot of filters to it, that is true. But it's mostly to dampen the
environment, not to enrich it. (Not that we don't enrich it as well.)
What I think the most important part is of your comment is how
profound is to look at reality with a different lens. Be that a false
color image like a laser scan, heatmap, space images, xray,
microscope... it can be a really intense experience, just as you
describe. Learning about the different filters (biases) that the
brain puts on the stimuli is quite mind-boggling as well.
mensetmanusman wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
Thatâs not actually reality. Itâs a facet of what form of energy
is there.
agumonkey wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
It goes beyond, your brain will also add an emotional bias on certain
patterns depending on how it fit our needs of the time.
Anecdotally it's quite "magical" that nature ended up as 80%
beautiful landscape (and sometimes the occasional horrendous sight)
as if beauty is an emergent property of the biosphere..
weinzierl wrote 16 hours 53 min ago:
What we see doesn't exist and we what exist we cannot see.
jerf wrote 17 hours 24 min ago:
If you want to go all misanthropic, it is much closer to reality to
say that we see only a small slice of what is in fact a world
colorful and detailed beyond all human ability to comprehend any but
a small slice of it. The "creepy gray horror movie render" is the
farthest thing from the truth, not the nearest.
npteljes wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
That is not misanthropic at all, as misanthropic is to hate humans
or humanity. This is just an acknowledgement of the limitations of
it. Agnosticism would be closer to it.
citizenpaul wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
You could argue that the grey blob or an incomprehensible
kaleidoscope of overwhelming info are both closer to reality than
what we perceive.
Anyway my point was that our color perception is arbitrary. Its all
just one fact, a lightwave/photon.
mvcalder wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
And thereâs only one photon, vibrating like mad, singularly
unable to contemplate its own magnificence.
teddyh wrote 17 hours 15 min ago:
Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: < [1] >
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HFFr0-ybg0
BurningFrog wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
The bumpy grey mass is where the matter is.
The colors you see is what kind of light the matter reflects.
Both are real!
photochemsyn wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
To generate a natural-color image of a biological sample using lasers
in the human eye's visible light range, you'd need a great many
lasers covering the entire frequency range. This generates hundreds
of datasets at each particular wavelength (ignoring issues like
laser-induced fluorescence, which can be managed with spectral
filtering).
The trick comes in taking all that data from the hundreds of images
generated by different-wavelength lasers and assembling them
layer-by-layer into an image the human brain interprets as color, aka
colorimetric rendering, onto the three-color-cone system the eye's
retina employs plus a bunch of neural processing (there's a complex
equation for this mapping of 'hyperspectral cube' data onto an RGB
display for human visualization).
There's a really strange example - the mantis shrimp - that used to
be thought to have rich color vision in a narrow band, but now people
think it might be a lot more direct, a kind of color vision without
much neural processing involved, with each photoreceptor scanning
slighty different wavelengths and directly signalling to the mantis
brain, such as it is:
Thoen et al. (2014) â "A different form of color vision in mantis
shrimp" (Science)
URI [1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1245824
IAmBroom wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
Having worked extensively at several companies in the 1990s trying to
bring optical measurement of objects into production environments, I
assure you that a lot of that bumpiness turns out to be artifacts of
the measurement process.
As just one example, there's really no laser-based measuring device
in the world, even today, that can rapidly measure a surface near
(<1mm) the edge of an object. Something that is trivial to do with
ruby-ball touch sensors...
abc_lisper wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
Does it mean repeated scans of the same objects show different
bumps?
Ifkaluva wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
Follow-up question, can one get rid of the bumps with standard
signal filtering techniques, or even averaging different scans
together?
nkrisc wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
> That is actually reality
No, it is just yet another incomplete view of reality. For example,
where are the infrared wavelengths in that scan? How can you say
"that is reality" if it doesn't include that information? You might
argue there are no true views of reality, that all views of reality
are only some incomplete interpretation of it.
We see only some minimal set of what is necessary for us to see in
order to survive with just enough certainty that we haven't gone
extinct.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
There is reality, then there are views/models of reality constructed
via various different ways of sensing reality, whether that's a
laser-scan depth map, normal human 3-color vision, occasional human
4-color vision, animal UV-sensitive vision, mass detectors,
magnetic/electrical field detectors, etc, etc.
Why should we regard one extremely arbitrary way of sensing reality
as more important or real than any of the others? Why is reflected
light important, not absorbed light? Why visible spectrum vs other
frequencies? Why human red/green/blue color cone detection (which is
no such thing - they are overlapping curves of frequency spectrum
sensitivity)? Why focus on light reflection, not sound? Why focus on
surface attributes of objects such as "color" rather then regard
other attributes such a mass distribution, or anything else as
primary?
Xss3 wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
No. We live in a world full of wavelengths. Our brains are giving us
a way to see them.
The laser scan is further from the truth of reality than vision as
it has less information about reality captured & displayed.
moralestapia wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
This.
Wowfunhappy wrote 16 hours 8 min ago:
Well, but you can't pass through a solid object, right? There's a
real "thing" there, it's not just a specific wavelength.
I realize "thing" is doing a lot of work in the above sentence, and
that everything is all just particles. Still, I think there's
something to the idea that form and shape are more real than color.
Xss3 wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
How are you defining a solid object with 'no wavelength'? Black
would be the perceived colour, or lackthereof, of said object.
The laser would see it the same as any colour of cube though.
The point is eyes are extracting more information from the image.
Visible light interactions with the object exists in reality and
capturing that information brings the image closer to reality,
not further. It tells you more about the cubes properties.
As an extreme example, you might have a space documentary start
by showing an image with a few stars, saying "it seems quiet",
then showing the same image with a bunch of colourful gasses
visible, saying 'but the reality is beyond what our eyes can
perceive, in infrared the image is full of detail'.
Reality, actual reality and not our perception of it, is made up
of every detail, the more of that information you can capture the
closer to reality the image.
mensetmanusman wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
Not particles, fields
widforss wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
Nobody tells you, but it's fields. It's always fields.
moralestapia wrote 10 hours 7 min ago:
always_has_been.png
vlovich123 wrote 15 hours 34 min ago:
> Well, but you can't pass through a solid object, right? There's
a real "thing" there, it's not just a specific wavelength.
FWIW the "solid" object you're observing is mostly space and the
"you can't pass through a solid object" as far as we know is just
a probability not a certainty.
weinzierl wrote 16 hours 54 min ago:
You mean perceive, like an insect bobbing up and down in the corner
of a swimming pool?
stronglikedan wrote 17 hours 11 min ago:
> We live in a world full of wavelengths. Our brains are giving us
a way to see them.
Nitpick, but if we're talking about the world full of wavelengths,
our brain gives us many ways to experience them!
Xss3 wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
Not sure what nit you're trying to pick. I said see (as in
vision, sight, the convo context!), not experience, and a way,
not the only way.
antonvs wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
Calvin and Hobbes addressed this:
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it...
datameta wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
I wonder if the median vividness of coloration of species has trended
downward since full spread of humans all over the globe. The brightest
birds in the tropics were relatively easy meals to procure compared to
more well-camoflauged species.
seydor wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
Video on the internet was not a popular thing until we had broadband
internet. Similarly it took millions of years for evolution to
capitalize on the much broader bandwidth of color vision. I don't even
want to know what will happen when we acquire infrared and uv vision
hoseja wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
We LOST infrared and UV vision by being little shrews scurrying in
darkness from glorious five-color-receptor-vision dinosaurs. Even the
third color we apes have we had to re-invent.
HPsquared wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
A lot of insects can see in UV.
Edit: interesting article here-
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_communication_in...
mytailorisrich wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
Yes, I read that pollinators see flowers very well because many are
very bright in UV against the background [1]. Lots or cool
pictures, too, if you Google "flowers UV".
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_coloration_in_flowers
bobosha wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
>Video on the internet was not a popular thing until we had broadband
internet.
I think it's an example of a post hoc fallacy. The popularity of
video was in large part responsible for the investment into broadband
in the first place.
Xss3 wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
A big driver for investment was the idea of 'internet tv'. Remember
MSN TV?
HPsquared wrote 19 hours 22 min ago:
Unlike evolution, humans can think ahead.
Filligree wrote 20 hours 55 min ago:
Flowers will happen. Most âwhiteâ flowers actually have landing
strips painted on them in ultraviolet.
xattt wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
With the evolution of tech that enables viewing past visible light,
humans have been able to find new ways of diagnosing and treating
conditions that were just âbandaged overâ a mere 200-300 years
ago.
delusional wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
Before reading:
It seems obvious to me that colors came before color vision. Natural
selection constrains diversity along the axes that it selects for,
while genetic mutations supply diversity along all axes simultaneously.
The net result would, intuitively for me, be that nature must have had
the colors before anyone could see them, since there was no reason to
constrain having colors.
We'll see if that ends up being anywhere close to correct.
teddyh wrote 17 hours 11 min ago:
You are assuming that a random mutation will cause all colors to be
equally likely. But, AIUI, there is a reason that all your standard
chemical powders in a normal chemistrly lab are white; colors are a
rare side effect of certain molecular properties. Most chemicals,
variated randomly, are extremely boring colors, mostly white.
xiande04 wrote 15 hours 13 min ago:
This tracks with life around deep sea vents where there is no
sunlight. It's mostly white and gray.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
Sure, color corresponds to a physical property, so obviously there
were things of different colors (sunlight, water, rainbows, rocks)
before life developed. Everything has a color.
Color vision (or just ability to differentiate 2 or more frequencies
of light) could have evolved a soon as there were forms of life for
who this was advantageous - potentially as simple as an ocean
organism orientating itself towards sunlight.
It seems the co-evolution of the property of color and color
detection ability in plant and animal species, must logically have
followed a basic ability to differentiate non-evolved natural colors.
aylmao wrote 18 hours 46 min ago:
That's assuming the only purpose of color vision is to see the colors
of other living organisms.
There's color in nature beyond life, such as in minerals and other
chemicals. There's also color in life that isn't necessarily meant to
convey something âsuch as the green of plants or the red in
bloodâ that could be useful for finding food, for example.
Interestingly, hemoglobin seems to have come to be > 400 mya too [1].
Moreover, color can help with contrast in vision. Two materials could
reflect the same amount of light, but in different wavelengths.
[1]
URI [1]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/ancient-blood-lines-t...
esafak wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
Almost. Reflectance is how we quantify an object's ability to absorb
and reflect light. This is the physical reality, unconstrained by
biology. Color is a sensation; how we perceive the reflectance based
on our trichromatic vision.
xiande04 wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
I think you're right. A specific example would be chlorophyll.
Chlorophyll is green, not because green was selected for. Instead,
it's just a side effect of the biochemistry needed to absorb energy
from sunlight.
layer8 wrote 18 hours 14 min ago:
Itâs not impossible that the mechanism was selected for
maximizing energy absorption within the sunlightâs spectral
distribution, depending on which of these curves is most relevant
(e.g. incidentally the green curve):
URI [1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spectral_Distribut...
Thrymr wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
Leaves aren't even very green, if you look at the full spectrum
of sunlight. They only reflect around 10% of green light, while
they are more like 90% reflective in the infrared. So you could
say that leaves are infrared. It's only our eyes' receptors that
see them as green, since they are not sensitive to infrared. (And
they are, for most plants, not a very bright green.)
xiande04 wrote 16 hours 9 min ago:
That's what I'm getting at. Green was needed to optimize energy
absorption from the sun. AFAIK, there are no other advantages to
selecting for green.
layer8 wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
Green is what is reflected, not absorbed. And green is
higher-energy than red, so naively one would expect that plants
should rather reflect red than green. However, I tried to point
out with the link that things might not be that simple; though
I really donât know.
astrobe_ wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
I wouldn't call that a side effect, because it is most likely a
must-have feature and plants were selectively pressured on that
(although I know some plants or trees have red to dark red leaves).
But yes. Logically, things have a natural color. Then animals
progressively acquired the ability to distinguish colors because it
was advantageous - for instance to spot a naturally brown yummy
insect on a naturally green leaf.
From there, one can imagine an amplification or reinforcement
process induced by co-evolution: plants take advantage of the fact
that animals can see colors, animals take advantage of the fact
that healthy plant produce fruits of a specific color. It
eventually turned into an armed race at times: TFA opens with the
example of a blue belly lizard, but one cannot help but think about
chameleons.
It was probably unavoidable as soon as something like a
photo-sensitive cell appeared. And it is also probably the same
thing with perceptions that are less obvious to us, such as odors,
sounds, or vibrations (other than of air or water - although I
wouldn't be surprised if hearing evolved from that point).
timewizard wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
> it is most likely a must-have feature
Why? I can imagine other chemical compounds with different
colors that perform the same function just with a greatly reduced
efficiency.
If there isn't any evolutionary competition then there could have
been a long period of time before plants with chlorophyll started
being produced and then dominating the landscape.
kevin_thibedeau wrote 19 hours 10 min ago:
Animals with camouflage coloration don't need to be able to see
that color themselves. They can find each other with chemical
signals and sound while hiding from their predators.
kibwen wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
The article mentions this:
"To be clear, there was color in the world before color vision.
Plant leaves, for example, reflect green light even if there are no
eyes to see it."
But also keep in mind that green plants are just the ones that won,
there are other chemistries with colors that work nearly as well
(particularly purple, which is still present on some plants).
delusional wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
After reading:
It turns out I didn't grasp what the authors meant by "colorful
signals". They're talking specifically about vivid colors that serve
an evolutionary purpose, and in that case it seems rather clear that
vision would have to come first. That is in fact also what turns out
to be the findings.
While the article is a fun and light read about some scientists doing
some literature review to try and approximate when color as a signal
evolved, I'm afraid the error bars are so large it's hard to find any
certainty.
The article does end with some speculation that vivid color can't
actually evolve without eyes that produce a natural selection bias,
since vivid color takes effort to construct. That claim of course has
the same efficacy problems as what the article is mainly dealing
with, but I do find it somewhat convincing, and have lowered my
certainty that vivid colors actually evolved first.
heresie-dabord wrote 18 hours 39 min ago:
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I'm inclined to think colour
occurred first, but there is of course no way to be sure. From our
point in geological time, this is a good test of our knowledge and
methods, but we are missing a significant amount of data. Several
major extinction events precede us.
From TFA:
"Color vision likely evolved twice independently, [Wiens ]
found, and around the same time: between 400 million and 500
million years ago in arthropods, such as insects, and in backboned
animals, such as fish. That places the evolution of color vision
100 million or 200 million years before any color signals."
At least twice...
"Wiens and Embertsâ data supports the hypothesis that color
evolved for some as-yet-unknown reason before any of these flashy
signals. âIt was color vision first, then fruit, then flowers,
then warning signals and then sexual signals,â Wiens said."
Angiosperm ancestors occurred more than 300 mya [1]. Insects are
older [2]. When insects and flowers evolved the commensal
relationships that we know so well today, the ensuing population
growth and diversification is termed an "explosion" for good
reason. [1]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_insects
taeric wrote 19 hours 15 min ago:
Tigers and such feel like a good counter example to colors needing
eyes to see them? Specifically, the color of tigers is largely
evolved against eyes that don't see the orange.
As such, many colors would be expected in environments that don't
confer an advantage to colors. And once an environment starts to
give advantage, you would expect rapid convergence.
Which, maybe I'm just reinforcing old learning of mine? Moths were
a specific way of teaching evolution in my grade school, and they
acted exactly as I just described. With soot covered areas growing
rise to black colorings and cleaner air giving rise to the
opposite.
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