That is what my brother is wont to say about my inability to distinguish colors. At RCC, I knew two others who were colorblind, Joe and Adam, so every now and then, someone would ask us to say what color we thought something was. Regardless, I was looking through the archives of [?external:http://www.damninteresting.com Damn Interesting] and found [?external:http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=473 A Life More Colorful]:
Since 1993 scientists in Oxford and Cambridge have been looking for a few women compared to whom, we may all be color-blind. These women would be the first known mammalian tetrachromats. In an odd twist of fate, the same genetic glitch that creates color-blind males may create females with better-than-usual color vision.
While it means passing on my colorblindness to any possible male descendants, I hope any female descendants of mine are tetrachromats.
…but what happens when a chromosome with two red receptor genes ends up with two different kinds?
This is where the tetrachromat becomes possible. A man with two red receptor genes, one normal, one modified, might have broader color vision than a normal color-blind man, but he would remain color-blind. A woman, on the other hand, with her redundant set of receptor genes, would have genes coding for not three kinds of receptors, but four.
I would find utter delight in their constant correction of color matching of “normal” people. The day may not be mine when it comes to differentiating between colors, but it may belong to my descendants…
… and not yours!
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