DNA Is You! by Beatrice the Biologist

Author:Beatrice the Biologist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Adams Media

It’s weird to remember that we’re not truly seeing anything for what it inherently is, but rather we’re seeing light bouncing off of it. We pick colors from it based on how our eyes receive those bounced waves of light and in turn relay the information to our brains. Our brains render everything and tell us, “That thingy is blue.”

I hope you just looked around and realized that you’re not seeing anything as it truly is and had a minor existential crisis. Those are fun.

Superseers

A strange thing is often true of the mothers and daughters of colorblind men (and 50 percent of their sisters too). They have a superpower that allows them to see colors the rest of us can’t. They are superseers.

Normal vision, as I described in a previous chapter, is based upon three different types of cones in our eyes. Each cone can differentiate between 100 different colors, so together they can perceive 1003 colors, or one million. That’s considered regular, average, Joe Shmoe vision. These individuals are called trichromats because they have three functioning cones.

Colorblind fellas are called dichromats since they have but two working cones. They can only see 1002 different shades of color, or ten thousand. That’s a lot less than a million. And I know that because . . . math.

So what of these superseers? They have four different types of cones, so they are called tetrachromats, and this fourth cone allows them to see a hundred times more colors than we lowly trichromats can. Superseers can distinguish between a hundred million different colors. The extra nintey-nine million colors they can see that the rest of us can’t don’t even have names, presumably since whoever thinks up names of colors is a trichromat.

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