Cutting Edge Color: Julia Hartling "Chasing Colors: Evolutionary Insights into Why We See Red (and Everything Else)"

Why do humans have color vision? The absence of color perception does not seem to impact our comprehension of the world - we don't need it to see motion, recognize faces, distinguish depth, and we enjoy watching black and white movies. Yet color vision and its associated vast neural circuitry has been maintained in humans and many other animals. There are two main hypotheses as to why our ancestors evolved trichromatic color vision. One theory is that it boosted our ability to find ripened food, and the other is that color vision enhanced our discrimination of emotional states, improving our ability to choose mates. Either way, here we are, animals with trichromatic color vision, maybe even moving into tetrachromacy. Most of us see hundreds of colors, but why do we each have our own preferences? There is a theory that favoring an object of a certain color translates into a general preference for that color, e.g. if you like red apples, you will like the color red. Colors carry complex meanings, can streamline our ability to make complex decisions, and therefore are adopted by virtually all human cultures to be powerful societal symbols. To what extent are color preferences universal or individual, and how do they vary with age, sex, and culture? We shall explore these questions and more as we consider our relationship to color.

Bio

Julia Hartling was born in the Soviet Union, and came to the USA in 1994. She has a Ph.D. In Evolutionary Biology from Yale University. For her dissertation she studied the evolution of protein structures and sequences. Julia is also an artist and published illustrator, and she has participated in many personal and group exhibitions, as well as producing various illustrations by commission.