Looking through the menu, Cliff thought about the colors of edible food here. Evolution geared animals and people alike to like the colors of things that were good or benign -- blue for skies and clear water, white for snow. People disliked browns and dark colors linked to feces and rotten food, and reds that might mean spices or poisons. Plants had evolved those as warding-off signals.Compare and contrast with Palmer & Schloss (2010):
Taylor, Clifford & Franklin (2012):
Taylor et al. (2013):
Note use of blue to make cover art attractive
Gregory and Larry lose the plot in the last 16 words when they depart from the script and add their own thoughts. Which are wrong. Far from "a warding-off signal", plants evolved red pigments as attractants, to birds such as might pollinate them or spread the seeds. Hence the name, 'bird peppers'. Then they evolved spices like 'capsaicin' to deter mammals -- who are colour-blind and can't see red -- from eating the fruits.Certain primates have evolved the neat hack of seeing red, and find it attractive, because tropical plants use the colour as an attractant to indicate the ripeness of fruit and the propagation-worthiness of their seeds. I shall hie me now to the Fainting Couch.
4 comments:
Far from "a warding-off signal", plants evolved red pigments as attractants, to birds such as might pollinate them or spread the seeds.
Maybe they thought that red pigments in plants are a case of Batesian mimicry. For example, the strawberry evolved a red pigment to mimic the strawberry poison dart frog, after which it is named.
So this is why everything we eat is blue and there are no brown foods?
Fear the tomato!
But, there is no blue food!!!
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