Why do we see the colors we do? Some of it goes back to the types of color-absorbing pigments that we inherited from bacteria more than a billion years ago. The specific colors we see are, in part, an artifact of bacterial needs. These ancient color-sensing pigments are tuned to two different wavelengths – shorter ones that correspond to blue and longer ones that go with yellows or reds. All other color vision is an outgrowth of that system, said neurobiologist Jay Neitz, who works in the ophthalmology department at the University of Washington.
View the original article here: Seeing color traced back to genetic mutations
