I am so pleased with this topic where the evolution from simple vision has progressed to things like ultraviolet and infrared and more. Good going to the contributors.
as far mutations go if it's of no advantage to the species survival it disappears back into the gene pool...we're not a nocturnal specie so visual heat detection isn't much benefit, our eyes are good at detecting motion(not as good as a bird, dog or cat but good enough for us as we're more omnivores than carnivore)...
I imagine good colour perception for plants would be handy for recognizing what's edible or toxic and when it's ripe...and fruit would be colourful to attract our attention so we eat it then crap out the seeds elsewhere helping it propagate itself and spread...
add to that our ancestors were all hunter gatherers and in contemporary hunter gatherer communities women are the primary gatherers and men the primarily the hunters...tie that to research that shows women "in general" have better colour perception than men, seeing more subtle hues than men can...whereas men "in general" tend to be better at visually detecting motion, handy for hunting...
It is a good thing technology adds these other abilities to us, night vision, and other spectrum not visible to human eyes. Add auditory spectrum too, sensors operating ranges far exceed humans parameters, and it is possible to create technological devices that can be used to augment human capabilities far beyond what is organically possible. Cybernetics and Bioengineering might make such possible.
I wonder how accurate that is. No, seriously, I wonder just how accurate all of that is? And I am not saying it's wrong.
When we reach a level of progress, I try to hearken back to my days as a child during WW2 and recall the vast progress made since those days. It prompts me to imagine life 100 years into the future and imagine things we think of today as not possible. We did not have the helicopter during WW2. I recall their use during Korea though.
This seems to be the fact, yes. I watched a couple spiders on my front porch over the years, sometimes up to 3 or 4 build their webs at nightfall, to catch a bug during the night as bugs were drawn to my front porch light. The beetles, hard shelled insects would sometimes get caught in the web and I would watch the spider check it out and then cut it loose from the web, as it was not the kind it was feeding on. And then repair its web. I was fascinated by this. And given the number of insects swarming at night, not many got caught up in the web. And I wondered why that was. These webs spanned from the top of the porch to the railings, which was a good distance so the area of capture was quite large when you looked at the small size of the spiders. By the next morning, by daylight, the spider would have removed the web so it was gone completely. And the next evening, start all over again with a new web. Fascinating! And marvelous even.
Actually unless the field of anthropology has changed since the early 70s, the idea that women gathered and the men hunted is indeed a commonality across time and tribal cultures. Not sure about the color deal or motion, for I have not seen any research that evidenced this. That I can recall, at any rate. What I did get out of studying tribal cultures though was the demand for cooperation within the tribe in order that all might be fed. So, this cooperation is still in our dna which IMO is why our militaries world so well, for they demand cooperation. I could almost feel this genetic influence when I was in boot camp. The same influence I had experienced on a football team when in public school.
Those that see men and women just the same way ought to have been on a football team or in the military where a lot of marching and running is normal. I know precisely what you mean. As to women selecting food in the plant world, there is no doubt in my mind that locating edible plants is far easier than locating some animal to kill. Even today with the rifle and it's long range, a true hunter is very skilled and hardy. When animals know they are being hunted, they are more wary and take off running when in danger. Humans never have been as swift as animals are. I believe what you believe about inborn lessons of tribes. I apply it to things like discrimination and segregation in fact. When England introduced slavery to this country, it was quite natural for the whites of that era to see blacks of that same era as having been caught and mastered. So they practiced discrimination to use them for producing incomes. Tribes must cooperate. We can see this as we see Democrats. Democrats thrive on the tribe mentality. We have passed that long ago as we passed slavery long ago. Democrats work against the tribe they love to much by talking up immigration and being diverse. They actually work against their own self interests. In Army boot camp, I happened to serve with a man who was the rank of Sgt. in Korea and when able he got discharged. He decided to come back into the Army some years out of Korea so the Army forced him back to basic training. They however did restore him to Sgt. once he finished Advanced Infantry Training. i think his aim was to retire after 20 odd years. But he told us all a lot about what took place in North Korea.
My dad served in korea after being with the US occupation forces in Japan and got wounded and was the only survivor in his detachment sent to make contact with the NKs. They had no lube for their guns, no grenades, and short on ammo and some officer bucking for a promotion took them out anyways against better judgement of some battle hardened sergeant. It ended badly with only my dad surviving but wounded.
I never personally saw them do it, but each morning they would be totally gone, not one strand left to say it had ever been there. I would watch them spin the web though, and it would still be pristine at midnight, when I would go out to smoke a cigar(I am retired) and watch to see if they would catch their meal for the day. This is when I saw one of them cut loose a beetle after checking it out, and something I saw several times over the years.
Had my uncle survived Korea, no doubt he would have stayed in past 20 years. He loved the Army. He was in the occupation forces in Japan when the war broke out and was sent very very early to Korea so he died at Taejon Korea which is far into the South of South Korea. My uncle was a Sgt and had survived the WW2 invasions of the islands in the Pacific. I don't recall all of his exact service but he did marry a German woman in Germany at the end of WW2. He entered the Army in 1939. HE was 26 the day he died. Several months short of being 27. I met a man locally once who had come back from Vietnam as a Captain in the Army. He told me how the Col. ordered him to take a company of men out to look for the enemy. He said he established a perimeter out a few miles and set up to stay there. When he got back the told the Col he had not seen the enemy. I asked him why he did not try harder to make contact and he said he wanted to keep living. Said the company he led had men who would shoot officers trying to contact the enemy. Anyway he smelled it was in the end stages as I recall what he said.
I heard about(and that is all I will say) about friendly fire taking out an officer who was green, and gung ho, unnecessarily risking lives of soldiers in Nam.
Though I do not recall this former Captains name, I do recall his job at the time. His family owned and operated a factory locally that makes wire clothes hangers and he was in management. A Captain should not be green yet in Vietnam it is possible for officers to move up ranks faster due to combat losses. I had a next door neighbor family whose son i knew who became an officer at OCS and at Vietnam was promoted clear up to Major. When I last saw him he was a Major and told me rank was quicker to get. I worked for a Captain in Germany who served as a Company Clerk in Korea who got his commission at OCS post Korea and was promoted to Major when the CO of the company i was the clerk of. This was 1963 so I guess he had been an officer at least 10 years. I talked to him when Clinton was president and he said he retired as a Lt. Col and had served in Vietnam.
which part? the colour recognition and motion detection is borne out in research...as to the advantage of colour recognition is still speculative but mutations that stick around are of some benefit otherwise they wouldn't remain... when looking at human behaviour reduce it to it's lowest natural level ( hunter gatherers) in order to make sense of that behaviour...
among hunter gatherers it's the women who provide most of the food, knowing what id toxic and what is not, where and when to find it requires extensive knowledge of the environment...men generally supplied protein women did as well but being but dragging children around limited their ability to do that... humans were never swift but no land animal can match us for endurance, man can run any animal into the ground, even easier if it's wounded...
I was thinking of the distance a horse can gallop and some animals such as the Wolverine can last for days upon days and is relentless so saying we can endure longer has me wondering. How long do you think a man can keep up with a horse? When I was a boy scout, we did study plants to learn what one can eat and those that are not safe to eat. I suppose a lot of women died eating bad plants and learned the differences.
horse vs man...it's already been done, man won...humans because we are bipedal are able to conserve energy plus we're hairless and sweat which regulates our body temp and prevents us from over heating...a horse or any animal galloping at full speed will quickly tire, they also over heat quickly because they're covered with fur... I actually tested this myself, I ran down a hare...I had no hope of ever catching it on a dead run but I just kept a slow but steady methodical pace catching up to it every time it stopped to rest...I kept this up until it couldn't run any longer, then I just picked it up... I let it go when it kicked me, I had no idea they could kick that hard...some hunter gathers of today still use the same method but they'll wound the animal first to speed it's fatigue... we industrialized types like to think we're very smart compared to hunter gatherers but the accumulated environmental knowledge of the HGs has to be near encyclopedic, the result hundreds of thousands years of trial and error passed on to every generation...every plant and animal characteristic and behaviour studied and memorized, no google in the jungle or desert...
I was also surprised to find out that spiders recycle the silk used in their webs. I find them fascinating and marvel at their skills and ability to form a structure that covers an area thousands of times bigger than themselves. The logistics involved is complex. How does a spider see a branch overhanging an area and works out where to spin a web from that branch. It somehow has to work out how and where to trail the silk to somewhere on the opposite side of that branch. Back to eyesight, do spiders have amazing eyesight, high level civil engineering skills or perhaps have an ability that we are yet to discover. Studying insects is the future source of human inventions IMO
I don't know about others, but I have found that women in general are much more observant of the surroundings than me. For example they seem to recall what everyone was wearing in a party whereas I would not even remember if a woman was wearing a dress or trousers (pants). Unless I had a special interest in that woman
