Posted: Feb 27, 2016 1:35 pm
CdesignProponentsist wrote:DavidMcC wrote:Before intermarraige with the Herero tribe, they were likely all tritanopes, (insensitive to blue light, because the refractive index of the human lens starts to change in the blue, and this would slightly blur their distance vision - an important issue for a tribe that has to spot tiny dots on the (blue) horizon. I wrote a thread on this a few years ago. It's mainly biology, not learning, that affects their vision.
After reading the actual paper it seams tritanopia was ruled out by testing children before language bias had set in. So this would falsify your hypothesis.
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There is no correspondence between Himba words for colour and English words for colour, so that a Himba might use the same word when an English person would use different ones for different actual colours. (Eg, yellow is described by the same Himba word as is used for white.) The likely reasonfor this is that the ancient Himba were likely tritanopes and modern Himba have lost the tritanopia, but retain the liguistic characteristics of it. (Eg, the sun is described as being the Himba version of "white")
Also, you have not answered the point that, if this was a real vision effect of language, why does it only affect the Himba? This does not make sense, except as a linguistic ambiguity in Himba words for colours, due to the shortage of those words.
Another example of Himba colour words is that they are taught that black is the colour of the daytime sky, but this is again cultural linguistic baggage, because, as you rightly say, they are no longer tritanopes, because of centuries of interbreeding with trichromats.