Re: Seeing a wider spectrum

CurtAdams@aol.com
Fri, 6 Aug 1999 21:13:59 EDT

In a message dated 8/6/99 8:47:59, eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:

>CurtAdams@aol.com writes:
>
> > An extremely deep purple, flecked with transient green dots (which
> > come from fluorescence of optical pigments).
>
>According to some forgotten source (Stryer?) certain monkeys have a
>fourth color in the making, in a couple of megayears there could have
>been four-color vision primates. (Of course if there is a Singularity
>the Earth won't probably exist by then).

Stryer, 3rd edition, p 1038. The monkey in question is Homo sapiens, which sometimes harbors duplications of our green photoreceptor gene. There is also a polymorphism in our (I think) red photoreceptor in that there are two different genes with slightly different absorption frequencies.