As a colour-blind person, this article both makes sense to me, and at the same time it doesn't. I have often wondered why human colour vision is not evenly distributed across the spectrum of visible light. This seems like a decent enough model for why that might be the case. However, that makes it very peculiar that there are so many people with colour-blindness like me, especially if it would be such a strong evolut…
i think the social species and specialization both plays a role, but we also have gender specialization. colorblindness effects 8% of men, but only .5% of women. maybe the men have less pressure to select ripe fruit / see social cues. i understand this is because of the x/y chromosome effect, but maybe since it barely effects women its not a strong enough evolutionary pressure to wipe colorblindness out completely.
That is a fair point. A slightly less friendly interpretation of this would be that men are the expendable gender, genetically speaking.
> maybe the men have less pressure to select ripe fruit / see social cues
I don't think any gender escapes the necessity to read social cues. There might be differences in which one though, but we're veering into a political minefield of nature/nurture questions here.
For example: there is a famous experiment where people were asked to guess if greyscale pictures of faces (cropped to not show hair) were male or female. The twist was that each face appeared twice, with the only difference in being how high the contrast was (especially the lips, IIRC).
High-contrast faces were more likely to be judged feminine than low-contrast faces. Again, this says nothing about whether this gender perception was nature or nurture.