I just got to thinking—I love watching The Universe, How the Earth Was Made, etc…and I remember arguing with Don Wollheim about the origin of flowers and colors (two separate debates, actually.) Today I’m thinking about color, and the tendency of many biologists to assume color perception had to do with mating display.

I don’t think so. I think the first ‘color’ other than white, black or brown, was red.

Why? Because in the deep sea, it’s a great advantage to be red if you’re not going to be transparent. You’re invisible. And many modern (but ancient) deep sea creatures are red…the vampire squid. etc.

The first evolution of sight was the ability to perceive light and dark and react to it. Since many corals have photosynthetic elements (zooxanthellae) that give them sugars via sunlight, I’d think that the ability to crawl into a sunnier spot (and many soft corals crawl, or grow ot a certain side)—is advantageous. It likely started because, like the little robot, things need input—in this case—of energy.

There followed the development of the ability to see motion. Many primitive creatures still register only movement against a still field. If you aren’t moving, you’re not there.

From that, the primitive brain developed the complexity to ‘expect’ or ‘track’ that movement and ‘store’ the position to track it down. Predictive tracking requires a few more dedicated neurons.

Beyond that I think camoflage became big business. The ability to look like your background.

I think red was the first ‘color’, and it was a protective pigmentation. I have a red coffee cup…and if I set it down in the darkened kitchen, I need to find Marvin the Martian’s eyes, because the red cup is just not visible. It’s no-color. It’s not there. And it’s not just my aging eyesight.

Redness developed in, I think, the early, early ocean. And when redness came up into the sunlight…predators found it advantageous to see red. Ergo (and we can’t prove this, since soft tissue doesn’t fossilize) the first development of color vision would have have come along as an evolving system for detecting red.

Genetics is a crap shoot. You tweak one thing and a dozen others tag along and get tweaked with it. Develop red, and pretty soon you’ve got weak red (pink) and then the zooxanthellae and their photosynethesis give you greens. And then you get some strange chemistry combos through mutation and you’ve got a yellow. If you’re a coral nibbler, seeing some of these  wavelengths is good. Now—we’re not always talking 20/20 vision here…and there’s the possibility of creatures seeing way over into spectra we don’t visit…eg, insects picking up uv. [Jane and I have had interesting arguments as we drive regarding how we see certain landscape, what predominates, and we’ve decided she sees more blue than I do. I think humans do see a bit into the high and low edges of the spectrum.)

I also think that colors in their origin are about biochemistry. There’s something in the makeup of flowers that makes yellow and purple ‘popular’ colors. Blues are hard to get—in flowers. Not hard in birds. and I think it’s about life process, chemicals of a certain sort in abundance: for instance, stony coral slurps up calcium and magnesium by the tablespoonful and builds what we call bone. In fact—animals (and corals are animals) are really fond of calcium (which not only builds our bones but powers our contractile tissue.) But plants—are really fond of phosphate and nitrogen—which in general, animals don’t like to bathe in. And we’re not green, and plants are. Its that chlorophyll thing—but it’s also what lives inside your skin, whether you have hemoglobin, and whether or not you were up near the primeval surface collecting light and making sugar, or down in the depths either trying to be red or to find what IS red. If our ‘blush’ hadn’t been an advantage, the survivors would have been the ones with thicker skin.

So there. I don’t think it’s mating displays, well, not for millions of years. I think it’s survival.