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]

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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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.

[cyprinella]

Blues in fish are caused by a similar property in their scales, I believe.

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.

[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.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

It is kind of hard to smell something a half kilometer away from the air

ummm.

I smell plenty of things a half a klick away and I KNOW my sense of smell sux.

Lots of animals smell each other from a long distance. half a klick is nothing.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

You can smell a sparrow from 500m?

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

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

You are aware they have been finding largish terrestrial dino eating )at least psittacosaurus eating) mammals, right? And mesozoic aquatic mammals too.

The mammalian story, the whole therapsid story, is a lot more complicated.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

nope.

I can smell elk. And certain kinds of rats: nasty, dirty little bastards. And other mammals.

People don't fly, but drivings probably as close as you get everyday with open windows. How many odors do you pick up driving along? Probably a nontrivial amount and more than a few that are actually pretty subtle.

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.

[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.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Elk are a bit larger than sparrows. They also intentionally generate musk.

I can smell things while driving, but trying to locate something by scent at 55 mph is not easy.

If I pitch a bit of cheese out into my lawn out of my dogs sight, then tell her "Go Get it", she will run directly to the cheese (within a half meter) and eat it.

[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.

[redbird]

Well, many mammals are smarter than many birds. I wouldn't ask a mouse to outsmart a parrot or crow.

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!