Re: Quest for colours: what's basic then?

Staving Danny Wier:
>Might as well chime in about what a non-human hominid interpretation of
>color might be.
>
>The retinas of Techs (I have now officially changed the name of the Techians
>as individuals to Techs; Techia is the name of the ethnic collective) have
>rods which detect brightness and darkness like humans, but unlike humans
>which have two kinds of cones, they have three types of cones, one for each
>primary light color: red, green and blue. This is leading me to think of how
>many 'basic' colors could exist.

Humans have three, although the red appears to have diverged from the green
in the recent evolutionary past (Most mammals are dichromatic, and I
believe that trichromaticity is found only in primates). The relevant
mutation is on the X chromosome, thus explaining the greater incidence of
red/green defects in men, and the occasional occurrence of
tetrachromaticity in women.

Pete