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reactordevtoday at 1:36 AM2 repliesview on HN

maybe in 100M years we'll get a 4th cone or rod. Probably from nuclear mutation...


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jaggederesttoday at 2:22 AM

We already have mutations, generally in women, for tetrachromaticism, who usually have male relatives with severe or moderate color blindness, in which the X chromosome encodes a different green cone. So they end up seeing red, strange-green, green, and blue, where strange-green is somewhere closer to red than green.

Only a few on record but they tend to have absolutely insane color matching and color perception. One of note worked in the fashion industry and could match fabrics perfectly even in varying lighting (e.g. working under fluorescent but able to match colors that would stay matched in halogen/stage lighting)

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int_19htoday at 2:19 AM

There's some evidence that tetrachromacy already exists in a few humans. If so we have the gene already. But why would it spread?