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Women See Colors Better
fenimor writes "The results of the study by researchers at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, suggests that natural genetic selection has provided women with a frequent ability to better discriminate between colors than men. 'Normally, this degree of genetic variation is suppressed through natural selection,' says Brian Verrelli, a researcher at ASU. 'In this case, nature is supporting a high degree of variation instead.' Because women have two X chromosomes, women can receive one chromosome with the typical configuration of the red vision gene while the other chromosome receives a slight variation. By contrast, men have one X chromosome, and any variation in the single red gene that they receive reduces their ability to distinguish between red and green."
This is old news. Studies published in 2000 based on data from the early 90s have talked of the tetrachromat phenomenon. See this article. There is even a mention of it in wikipedia. Some people even think that all humans are blocked tetrachromats.
If I ever met you, I would stab you repeatedly with a knife for not giving a warning.
An aside on this: the military recruits color blind individuals very heavily.
They do..? After deciding to join the service, I looked through the Army MOS specifications: less than 20 out of 200 jobs the Army offers allow for red-green deficiency. Specifically, the Army doesn't allow color-blind programmers (much less infantry.) Go figure.
The Air Force, which is who I intend on going with, seems to think that black text on white backgrounds isn't a bane to us with minor red-green deficiency. w0074r.
By the way, the official MOS descriptions for the Army are located here. You can also find all of the other official descriptions for the other services at the wonderful website as well.
This statement is false.