I'm not sure this question even makes sense

[james_davis_nicoll]

But why are humans so drab compared to, say, birds? Is it just that mammals in general have lousy color vision (although ours is better than average) and that we're descended from animals that wouldn't have been able to make use of a wide variety of fur colors or is it that there's something about fur and hair that inherently limits its palette?

I will admit this ranks lower on my "inherent human features that require fixing" than the vitamin C thing, particularly given the existance of non-toxic dyes.

Comments

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

Drab?
Speak for yourself, I'm quite dapper. :)

[geekosaur]

Birds aren't drab because they can mostly get away with it. For land animals, drab = safe because the alternative makes you an easy target for predators. Exceptions usually have some way to drab down; peacocks only show their flash at mating time and do their best to avoid predators.

[sunshaker.livejournal.com]

For predators, being drab = better chance of catching prey.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

Mammals are also scent specialists.

It's not the rest of mammalia's fault that the WMD of the synapsids can't pick up that great boutique of life correctly.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

It is kind of hard to smell something a half kilometer away from the air, but if your potential mate is all shiny and flashy, s/he is easy to find.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Birds have bright colors, we have novels and operas and dirty limericks.

Pretty much all through our evolution

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

hominids without significant tools are food. We're soft, were small until the most recent iterations, and slow compared to just about every predator wherever we immigrated to.

Some of the small monkeys are colorful to an extent but they live in the trees. And the king of color, the male Mandrill, is not a small, soft creature.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Many birds are drab, at least to UV-deficient vision; they use songs or bowers to attract mates. And you might better ask why humans are so drab: chimps, gorillas, monkeys, mice, cats, bears. Of course, some of these do have sex-specific colors, but not most. Scent, nocturnality, not getting eaten.

We know hair/fur can do red and yellow. Blue fur exists (blue fox, russian blue house cat) though they're blue-grey; I don't know if any bright blue exists, or green (short of sloths and polar bears letting algae grow on them). Don't know if there's any hard limit. Red's better for getting attention and brown's usually better for camouflage.

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

The bright blues and really iridescent greens among feathers are properties of the refractivity of the feather, not its actual colour. (Grind up blue jay feathers and nothing they're made of is blue.)

This evolved fairly recently.

Mammals spent 120 million years being small, nocturnal, and cryptic; this more or less permanently constrained the choice space for mammalian evolution.

We also use different keratin molecules compared to birds; the colour range may be more restricted.

Colours

[(Anonymous)]

Most birds are pretty drab too, and some mammal groups can be quite colourful - look at the primates. As earlier posters noted, it's a complex summation of evolutionary history, locomotory mode, primary communication mode, size and predation pressure. Also it pays to be really garish or even tastefully colourful if you are highly toxic. And it's another way of demonstrating how very fit you are if it does carry a penalty - a lot of male birds are brightly coloured in order to demonstrate that they are such champions that they don't have to worry about predators

- Lars

I'll hazard a guess.

[0ccam.livejournal.com]

The "Bright" humans were killed off by predators before we invented ranged weapons.


"Predator" here can include other humans.

Re: I'll hazard a guess.

[mrteufel.livejournal.com]

So prejudice against blondes and red-heads is an evolutionary left-over? ;)

[trogon.livejournal.com]

Well, there are plenty of drab birds.

The colors available for fur are more limited than those for feathers, though; blue and green colors in feathers aren't actually due to pigment, but to the barbs of the feathers acting as a diffraction grating. (Green is usually but not always blue from diffration + yellow pigment.) Fur just doesn't have the sort of physical structure that can produce this effect.

I suspect mammals overall more or less run the gamut of available fur colors, and to be honest there aren't many fur colors that aren't represented in natural human hair colors.

You had it right the first time

[(Anonymous)]

Mammals in general have lousy color vision. 90% of all mammal genera are dichromats or worse. Only some primates and a few other odds and ends are trichromats.

Surprise: if you index out colors for camouflage (leopards and such), only a handful of mammals have colorful displays -- and that group is dominated by, hey, primates.

Birds are tetrachromats, which means all birds have better color vision than any mammal -- us included.

So birds /can/ be drab, but the majority of mammals /must/ be.


Doug M.

Re: You had it right the first time

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

There are humans with four photopigments. tests have shown they experience color differently than trichromats: they identify more bands in the spectrum, for instance.

It'll probably be one of the next evolutionary tweaks. Go positive selection!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Mammals are a lot smarter than birds, so we don't need nearly such an in-your-face indication that a prospective mate is of the right species. Also we're more scent-oriented, and use that a lot for mate selection. Birds do the flying thing, which means they're not very well camouflaged anyway, and need to be on the lookout for predators, and need to find food and shelter from further away, so they're more visual. And the avian predators even more so.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Mammals are a lot smarter than birds,

This will end badly.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Cats and dogs appear to be able to have a lot of different colors and patterns with fur, so I don't think that it's inherent. . . I mean, the colors aren't as bright and varied as, say, fish and birds manage, but they still get something more interesting than "shades of brown through pink."

[oh6.livejournal.com]

Our ability to make ourselves fantastically garish if we feel like it is intrinsic, so we're not drab in practice. Bowerbirds are pretty plain, but their bowers aren't.

[wayward-va.livejournal.com]

The vitamin C thing? I assume you're referring to the fact that humans don't make their own vitamin C like cats do, right? I'll agree that's an important thing to fix. I'm curious what the other important fixes are.

important fixes

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

knees -- at least two more ligaments, but probably better to stick an extra bone between the long bones to support extra cushioning and some twist restriction.

sinuses -- these aren't going to fully adapt to a fully upright stance by themselves.

lower back -- adding short ribs and more muscles are probably the way to go for the lumbar vertebrae. Get some cover for the kidneys in the process.

neck -- we have a heavy head and a strange vertical posture; there's probably something better to be done for the cervical vertebrae and the nasty tendency to snap with unexpected accelerations.

That whole unfortunate aging thing, too.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

We're drab to hide the mammoth-grease stains.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

On a slightly-related note...

Did you see the little news blurb about the PINK lizard they found somewhere on the Galapagos Islands?

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

It's an iguana. They apparently have pink and yellow iguanas in the Galapagos, which means that if one were careful one could have an ENTIRE EASTER BASKET OF IGUANAS!!!!

I like iguanas. I am not allowed to have one, however, because they are not cats.

[trogon.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me that choosing birds is setting your bar too low, when cuttlefish can do multicolored animation on their skin. (And they can detect polarization of light.)

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Human language is our birdsong.

According to Pinker (IIRC), the loquacious and the clever-talking are considered attractive independent of culture, so it's not just an analogy; human language is actually equivalent to birdsong in its demonstration of fitness and desirability.

Humans also have brainware with the dedicated purpose of recognizing and distinguishing faces. It's so dominant that we see faces in everything from car grills to pieces of toast. So, compared to peacocks and macaws, we may not be objectively very display-oriented, but as far as the ability to distinguish and the effort we put into distinguishing go, we are very easy to distinguish.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

Insufficient time at the top of the food chain? Red and blonde hair are fairly recent on the evolutionary scale, possibly as young as 20ky.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1019030.ece
Another piece claimed blonde hair was as recent as 10-11ky.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-378390/Proof-cavemen-preferred-blondes-too.html

[nelc.livejournal.com]

It's (partly) because mammals only use melanin for colouring, whereas birds use melanin, caretinoids, and porphyrins, not to mention iridescence effects from feather fibres. Melanin only does variations on black, whereas caretinoids do yellow to red, and porphyrins do red to green.

The fact that birds are tetrachromatic in their vision, whereas many mammals are monochromatic, or trichromatic at best, probably also has something to do with it.