Colour #2: Magnus and Evolution

In the last blog, we saw how Gladstone’s analysis seemed to suggest that the Homerian Greeks were colour blind. Lazarus Geiger came to a similar conclusion when he went over the Vedas – the ancient Indians seemed colour blind too, as were the Old Testament era folks. No word for blue, for example. The Icelandic sage and the Koran share some of these characteristics, writes Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass.

 

Therefore, concluded Geiger, all of mankind must have been colour blind (relative to us today) in that era (Ancient Egypt didn’t fit in: they used blue paint and even had a name for it. But they were considered the exception to the rule). But how does one check if this colour blindness theory was true?

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Enter Hugo Magnus, a Prussian ophthalmologist. His contribution was facilitated by events which made the topic of colour detection a practically important topic, not just a philosophical musing.

 

In 1875, two Swedish trains had a massive collision. Given the damage and death toll, the public wanted to know the cause. Frithiof Holmgren wondered if the driver and/or engine-man were colour blind and had mistaken red (stop) for white (go). Both men had died, so there was no way to check. But Holmgren was able to convince the railways to check if employees could distinguish colours. His test involved showing them forty skeins of wool in different hues. 13 of the 266 employees were found to be colour blind. Suddenly, colour blindness was a hot topic, no longer just an academic trivia.

 

Magnus came up with a theory to explain colour blindness. Our ancestors operated in an age where activities were between dawn and dusk, so their vision was suited for the time when sunlight was bright. But as man evolved ways to have light beyond dark, humans began to develop the ability to see better at night, thus expanding their vision (Darwin and the idea of evolution was still in the future. The idea here was that by practice and repeated usage, humans could expand their capabilities). Magnus said this explained why all ancient cultures saw and named red first – it was the most intense colour in the day (also the colour of blood), so we got sensitized to it first.

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Looking back, we may be amused by Magnus’ theory. We know now capabilities can be enhanced with practice, but they don’t get passed onto the next generation. Plus, evolution works very slowly, definitely not at the speed to explain why the folks from Vedas/Homer/Koran era couldn’t see colours that we can see so easily. But we know that only because of (much) later day learnings like genetics, DNA, how inheritance works, and thus the speed of evolution. Plus, only later-day physics told us that red has the least energy (not most), so by that criteria, we should have developed red sensitivity last, not first.

 

In Magnus’ time, none of the above was known and his theory sounded entirely plausible. The only counter-argument in his era was this: The deficiencies in the colour range of the ancients did not lie in their anatomical limitations. Rather, it was a limitation in the vocabulary of their language. Just because they didn’t have a word for a colour didn’t necessarily mean they couldn’t see it. It just meant the colour was of no consequence, so they didn’t bother coining a word for it.

 

The debate on language (reflects reality v/s a lens that influences how we perceive reality) had now gotten started.