When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
The laser scan is further from the truth of reality than vision as it has less information about reality captured & displayed.
Nitpick, but if we're talking about the world full of wavelengths, our brain gives us many ways to experience them!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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) – "A different form of color vision in mantis shrimp" (Science)
The colors you see is what kind of light the matter reflects.
Both are real!
Anyway my point was that our color perception is arbitrary. Its all just one fact, a lightwave/photon.
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..
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.
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.
Edit: interesting article here- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_communication_in...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/chinese-rainbow-dinosa...
Hard to believe their claim fish are the first to evolve color for mating displays 100 million years ago.
My blood is red because it has iron in it not because there's an evolutionary link to my eyesight.
Perhaps because it's not truly known.
> The discovery "suggests a more colourful Jurassic World than we previously imagined,"
-- from your link
It seems that the logical colour for a leaf would be completely black - absorbing all energy. Fortunately that isn't how it worked out.
They need to absorb red and blue light
At least thats my assumption on why planta dont absorb green.
I mean, that shouldn't be too surprising since plants don't have vision at all and still evolved colors.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"Wiens and Emberts’ data supports the hypothesis that color evolved for some as-yet-unknown reason before any of these flashy signals. “It was color vision first, then fruit, then flowers, then warning signals and then sexual signals,” Wiens said."
"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).
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).
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.
When there's no environmental pressure, genetics can do whatever it wants (to a certain extent), which leads to a diversification which in turn is very valuable when a constrain suddenly appears in the environment, or to conquer new biomes. This remembered me of the "Cambrian explosion" [1] and coincidentally this article refers to the evolution of the eye.
With regard to green chlorophyll, it is safe to say that a very common environmental pressure is present that makes it green, judging from how dominant it is. I guess that it doesn't apply to species that have red/dark red/purple foliage due to their specific ecosystem niche, or maybe an even greater constrain is at play ?
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 —such as the green of plants or the red in blood— 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]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/ancient-blood-lines-t...
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.