Color Blindness: An Evolutionary Approach.

Abstract

The book offers a description of basic physical properties of light, color, the pigments, and their role in visual processes; it discusses color vision theories, anomalies, their diagnosis, and classification. In view of the size of the book, the basic physiological facts are treated not in too much detail but contain a fair and up-to-date introduction to the understanding of color vision and methods of color vision testing. The most important and valuable chapters make up the second half of the book. The author discusses the causes, origin, geographic distribution, and evolution of color deficiencies. Color vision and color blindness in man has a long evolutionary history which can be traced historically and geographically as for instance the distribution of color blindness in Africa and South America where deficiencies prevail in coastal regions while they are absent in the center of the continents. In the color deficient, lack of sensitivity