[HN Gopher] When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?
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When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?
Author : jandrewrogers
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-06-27 16:09 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| delusional wrote:
| Before reading:
|
| It seems obvious to me that colors came before color vision.
| Natural selection constrains diversity along the axes that it
| selects for, while genetic mutations supply diversity along all
| axes simultaneously. The net result would, intuitively for me, be
| that nature must have had the colors before anyone could see
| them, since there was no reason to constrain having colors.
|
| We'll see if that ends up being anywhere close to correct.
| delusional wrote:
| After reading:
|
| It turns out I didn't grasp what the authors meant by "colorful
| signals". They're talking specifically about vivid colors that
| serve an evolutionary purpose, and in that case it seems rather
| clear that vision would have to come first. That is in fact
| also what turns out to be the findings.
|
| While the article is a fun and light read about some scientists
| doing some literature review to try and approximate when color
| as a signal evolved, I'm afraid the error bars are so large
| it's hard to find any certainty.
|
| The article does end with some speculation that vivid color
| can't actually evolve without eyes that produce a natural
| selection bias, since vivid color takes effort to construct.
| That claim of course has the same efficacy problems as what the
| article is mainly dealing with, but I do find it somewhat
| convincing, and have lowered my certainty that vivid colors
| actually evolved first.
| taeric wrote:
| Tigers and such feel like a good counter example to colors
| needing eyes to see them? Specifically, the color of tigers
| is largely evolved against eyes that don't see the orange.
|
| As such, many colors would be expected in environments that
| don't confer an advantage to colors. And once an environment
| starts to give advantage, you would expect rapid convergence.
|
| Which, maybe I'm just reinforcing old learning of mine? Moths
| were a specific way of teaching evolution in my grade school,
| and they acted exactly as I just described. With soot covered
| areas growing rise to black colorings and cleaner air giving
| rise to the opposite.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I'm inclined to think
| colour occurred first, but there is of course no way to be
| sure. From our point in geological time, this is a good test
| of our knowledge and methods, but we are missing a
| significant amount of data. Several major extinction events
| precede us.
|
| From TFA: "Color vision likely evolved
| twice independently, [Wiens ] found, and around the same
| time: between 400 million and 500 million years ago in
| arthropods, such as insects, and in backboned animals, such
| as fish. That places the evolution of color vision 100
| million or 200 million years before any color signals."
|
| _At least twice_... "Wiens and Emberts'
| data supports the hypothesis that color evolved for some as-
| yet-unknown reason before any of these flashy signals. "It
| was color vision first, then fruit, then flowers, then
| warning signals and then sexual signals," Wiens said."
|
| Angiosperm ancestors occurred more than 300 mya [1]. Insects
| are older [2]. When insects and flowers evolved the commensal
| relationships that we know so well today, the ensuing
| population growth and diversification is termed an
| "explosion" for good reason.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_insects
| xiande04 wrote:
| I think you're right. A specific example would be chlorophyll.
| Chlorophyll is green, not because green was selected for.
| Instead, it's just a side effect of the biochemistry needed to
| absorb energy from sunlight.
| kibwen wrote:
| The article mentions this:
|
| _" To be clear, there was color in the world before color
| vision. Plant leaves, for example, reflect green light even
| if there are no eyes to see it."_
|
| But also keep in mind that green plants are just the ones
| that won, there are other chemistries with colors that work
| nearly as well (particularly purple, which is still present
| on some plants).
| astrobe_ wrote:
| I wouldn't call that a side effect, because it is most likely
| a must-have feature and plants were selectively pressured on
| that (although I know some plants or trees have red to dark
| red leaves).
|
| But yes. Logically, things have a natural color. Then animals
| progressively acquired the ability to distinguish colors
| because it was advantageous - for instance to spot a
| naturally brown yummy insect on a naturally green leaf.
|
| From there, one can imagine an amplification or reinforcement
| process induced by co-evolution: plants take advantage of the
| fact that animals can see colors, animals take advantage of
| the fact that healthy plant produce fruits of a specific
| color. It eventually turned into an armed race at times: TFA
| opens with the example of a blue belly lizard, but one cannot
| help but think about chameleons.
|
| It was probably unavoidable as soon as something like a
| photo-sensitive cell appeared. And it is also probably the
| same thing with perceptions that are less obvious to us, such
| as odors, sounds, or vibrations (other than of air or water -
| although I wouldn't be surprised if hearing evolved from that
| point).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Animals with camouflage coloration don't need to be able to
| see that color themselves. They can find each other with
| chemical signals and sound while hiding from their
| predators.
| timewizard wrote:
| > it is most likely a must-have feature
|
| Why? I can imagine other chemical compounds with different
| colors that perform the same function just with a greatly
| reduced efficiency.
|
| If there isn't any evolutionary competition then there
| could have been a long period of time before plants with
| chlorophyll started being produced and then dominating the
| landscape.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not impossible that the mechanism was selected for
| maximizing energy absorption within the sunlight's spectral
| distribution, depending on which of these curves is most
| relevant (e.g. incidentally the green curve): https://commons
| .wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spectral_Distributio...
| xiande04 wrote:
| That's what I'm getting at. Green was needed to optimize
| energy absorption from the sun. AFAIK, there are no other
| advantages to selecting for green.
| layer8 wrote:
| Green is what is reflected, not absorbed. And green is
| higher-energy than red, so naively one would expect that
| plants should rather reflect red than green. However, I
| tried to point out with the link that things might not be
| that simple; though I really don't know.
| esafak wrote:
| Almost. _Reflectance_ is how we quantify an object 's ability
| to absorb and reflect light. This is the physical reality,
| unconstrained by biology. _Color_ is a sensation; how we
| _perceive_ the reflectance based on our trichromatic vision.
| aylmao wrote:
| That's assuming the only purpose of color vision is to see the
| colors of other living organisms.
|
| There's color in nature beyond life, such as in minerals and
| other chemicals. There's also color in life that isn't
| necessarily meant to convey something --such as the green of
| plants or the red in blood-- that could be useful for finding
| food, for example. Interestingly, hemoglobin seems to have come
| to be > 400 mya too [1].
|
| Moreover, color can help with contrast in vision. Two materials
| could reflect the same amount of light, but in different
| wavelengths.
|
| [1]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/ancient-blood-
| lines-t...
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, color corresponds to a physical property, so obviously
| there were things of different colors (sunlight, water,
| rainbows, rocks) before life developed. Everything has a color.
|
| Color vision (or just ability to differentiate 2 or more
| frequencies of light) could have evolved a soon as there were
| forms of life for who this was advantageous - potentially as
| simple as an ocean organism orientating itself towards
| sunlight.
|
| It seems the co-evolution of the property of color and color
| detection ability in plant and animal species, must logically
| have followed a basic ability to differentiate non-evolved
| natural colors.
| teddyh wrote:
| You are assuming that a random mutation will cause all colors
| to be equally likely. But, AIUI, there is a reason that all
| your standard chemical powders in a normal chemistrly lab are
| _white_ ; colors are a _rare_ side effect of certain molecular
| properties. Most chemicals, variated randomly, are extremely
| boring colors, mostly white.
| xiande04 wrote:
| This tracks with life around deep sea vents where there is no
| sunlight. It's mostly white and gray.
| seydor wrote:
| Video on the internet was not a popular thing until we had
| broadband internet. Similarly it took millions of years for
| evolution to capitalize on the much broader bandwidth of color
| vision. I don't even want to know what will happen when we
| acquire infrared and uv vision
| Filligree wrote:
| Flowers will happen. Most "white" flowers actually have landing
| strips painted on them in ultraviolet.
| xattt wrote:
| With the evolution of tech that enables viewing past visible
| light, humans have been able to find new ways of diagnosing
| and treating conditions that were just "bandaged over" a mere
| 200-300 years ago.
| bobosha wrote:
| >Video on the internet was not a popular thing until we had
| broadband internet.
|
| I think it's an example of a post hoc fallacy. The popularity
| of video was in large part responsible for the investment into
| broadband in the first place.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Unlike evolution, humans can think ahead.
| Xss3 wrote:
| A big driver for investment was the idea of 'internet tv'.
| Remember MSN TV?
| HPsquared wrote:
| A lot of insects can see in UV.
|
| Edit: interesting article here-
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_communication_in...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Yes, I read that pollinators see flowers very well because
| many are very bright in UV against the background [1]. Lots
| or cool pictures, too, if you Google "flowers UV".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_coloration_in_flowers
| datameta wrote:
| I wonder if the median vividness of coloration of species has
| trended downward since full spread of humans all over the globe.
| The brightest birds in the tropics were relatively easy meals to
| procure compared to more well-camoflauged species.
| antonvs wrote:
| Calvin and Hobbes addressed this:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
| citizenpaul wrote:
| One of the most disturbingly creepy things I've realized is when
| looking at render of a laser scanned environment. The oddly bumpy
| and uneven gray mass that everything show up as. That is actually
| reality. The filtered colorful smooth version we see is an
| arbitrary specific wavelength interpretation that our brains
| developed. We are actually living in that creepy gray horror
| movie render of the laser scan.
| Xss3 wrote:
| No. We live in a world full of wavelengths. Our brains are
| giving us a way to see them.
|
| The laser scan is further from the truth of reality than vision
| as it has less information about reality captured & displayed.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > We live in a world full of wavelengths. Our brains are
| giving us a way to see them.
|
| Nitpick, but if we're talking about the _world full_ of
| wavelengths, our brain gives us _many_ ways to _experience_
| them!
| weinzierl wrote:
| You mean _perceive_ , like an insect bobbing up and down in
| the corner of a swimming pool?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Well, but you can't pass through a solid object, right?
| There's a real "thing" there, it's not just a specific
| wavelength.
|
| I realize "thing" is doing a lot of work in the above
| sentence, and that everything is all just particles. Still, I
| think there's something to the idea that form and shape are
| more real than color.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > Well, but you can't pass through a solid object, right?
| There's a real "thing" there, it's not just a specific
| wavelength.
|
| FWIW the "solid" object you're observing is mostly space
| and the "you can't pass through a solid object" as far as
| we know is just a probability not a certainty.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Not particles, fields
| moralestapia wrote:
| This.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There is reality, then there are views/models of reality
| constructed via various different ways of sensing reality,
| whether that's a laser-scan depth map, normal human 3-color
| vision, occasional human 4-color vision, animal UV-sensitive
| vision, mass detectors, magnetic/electrical field detectors,
| etc, etc.
|
| Why should we regard one extremely arbitrary way of sensing
| reality as more important or real than any of the others? Why
| is reflected light important, not absorbed light? Why visible
| spectrum vs other frequencies? Why human red/green/blue color
| cone detection (which is no such thing - they are overlapping
| curves of frequency spectrum sensitivity)? Why focus on light
| reflection, not sound? Why focus on surface attributes of
| objects such as "color" rather then regard other attributes
| such a mass distribution, or anything else as primary?
| nkrisc wrote:
| > That is actually reality
|
| No, it is just yet another incomplete view of reality. For
| example, where are the infrared wavelengths in that scan? How
| can you say "that is reality" if it doesn't include that
| information? You might argue there are no true views of
| reality, that all views of reality are only some incomplete
| interpretation of it.
|
| We see only some minimal set of what is necessary for us to see
| in order to survive with just enough certainty that we haven't
| gone extinct.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Having worked extensively at several companies in the 1990s
| trying to bring optical measurement of objects into production
| environments, I assure you that a lot of that bumpiness turns
| out to be artifacts of the measurement process.
|
| As just one example, there's really no laser-based measuring
| device in the world, even today, that can rapidly measure a
| surface near (<1mm) the edge of an object. Something that is
| trivial to do with ruby-ball touch sensors...
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Does it mean repeated scans of the same objects show
| different bumps?
| Ifkaluva wrote:
| Follow-up question, can one get rid of the bumps with
| standard signal filtering techniques, or even averaging
| different scans together?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| To generate a natural-color image of a biological sample using
| lasers in the human eye's visible light range, you'd need a
| great many lasers covering the entire frequency range. This
| generates hundreds of datasets at each particular wavelength
| (ignoring issues like laser-induced fluorescence, which can be
| managed with spectral filtering).
|
| The trick comes in taking all that data from the hundreds of
| images generated by different-wavelength lasers and assembling
| them layer-by-layer into an image the human brain interprets as
| color, aka colorimetric rendering, onto the three-color-cone
| system the eye's retina employs plus a bunch of neural
| processing (there's a complex equation for this mapping of
| 'hyperspectral cube' data onto an RGB display for human
| visualization).
|
| There's a really strange example - the mantis shrimp - that
| used to be thought to have rich color vision in a narrow band,
| but now people think it might be a lot more direct, a kind of
| color vision without much neural processing involved, with each
| photoreceptor scanning slighty different wavelengths and
| directly signalling to the mantis brain, such as it is:
|
| Thoen et al. (2014) - "A different form of color vision in
| mantis shrimp" (Science)
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1245824
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The bumpy grey mass is where the matter is.
|
| The colors you see is what kind of light the matter reflects.
|
| Both are real!
| jerf wrote:
| If you want to go all misanthropic, it is much closer to
| reality to say that we see only a small slice of what is in
| fact a world colorful and detailed beyond all human ability to
| comprehend any but a small slice of it. The "creepy gray horror
| movie render" is the farthest thing from the truth, not the
| nearest.
| teddyh wrote:
| Donald Hoffman, _The Case Against Reality_ :
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HFFr0-ybg0>
| citizenpaul wrote:
| You could argue that the grey blob or an incomprehensible
| kaleidoscope of overwhelming info are both closer to reality
| than what we perceive.
|
| Anyway my point was that our color perception is arbitrary.
| Its all just one fact, a lightwave/photon.
| mvcalder wrote:
| And there's only one photon, vibrating like mad, singularly
| unable to contemplate its own magnificence.
| weinzierl wrote:
| What we see doesn't exist and we what exist we cannot see.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It goes beyond, your brain will also add an emotional bias on
| certain patterns depending on how it fit our needs of the time.
|
| Anecdotally it's quite "magical" that nature ended up as 80%
| beautiful landscape (and sometimes the occasional horrendous
| sight) as if beauty is an emergent property of the biosphere..
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That's not actually reality. It's a facet of what form of
| energy is there.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Did they purposely ignore dinosaurs? Feathered dinosaurs are
| known to be colorful
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/world/chinese-rainbow-dinosa...
|
| Hard to believe their claim fish are the first to evolve color
| for mating displays 100 million years ago.
| timewizard wrote:
| Bacteria can be colorful. It can also fluoresce.
|
| My blood is red because it has iron in it not because there's
| an evolutionary link to my eyesight.
| awhitby wrote:
| You're very likely right there's no causation in that
| direction, but it seems entirely possible that we experience
| red as a vivid color in part because noticing blood is
| evolutionarily important.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Feathered dinosaurs are known to be colorful
|
| Perhaps because it's not _truly_ known.
|
| > The discovery " _suggests_ a more colourful Jurassic World
| than we previously imagined, "
|
| -- from your link
| ethan_smith wrote:
| The article likely distinguishes between simply having colors
| versus evolving colors specifically for sexual selection -
| fossil evidence can show dinosaur coloration but determining
| behavioral purpose is much harder than observing living fish
| species.
| wtcactus wrote:
| A very interesting tidbit of information I've only
| learned/realized when I was already an adult, is that many
| otherwise plain flowers have really intricate patterns in the
| ultraviolet, since some insects see in that spectrum.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _They have evolved even in species that don't have color
| vision, likely because their predators do._
|
| I mean, that shouldn't be too surprising since plants don't have
| vision _at all_ and still evolved colors.
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