She isn’t super good at naming colors so far, aside from black, white, and brown. I got the feeling she was saying “blue” because she didn’t know what to call them.
Oh well, not a big deal I know, just an interesting thing to ponder on a very frustrating rainy day at home with the toddler.
There are girls and women who have XY chromosomes. Androgen insensitivity syndrome can cause such people to develop as female despite having Y chromosomes. It’s possible (but unlikely) that your daughter has this syndrome and red-green color blindness at the same time.
My cousin is red green colourblind, and though my uncle is, her maternal grandfather (apparently) wasn’t. Or maybe, as was suggested up thread, he was but just mildly enough to not notice.
So just to add a data point: it can happen.
And here is a new, useful word coined by my BIL: grouwn. It means all colours us confused colour-seers sort into red/green/brown. They are actually all one colour: grouwn.
At that age I couldn’t tell red and green apart – but I wasn’t colorblind, just a kid who didn’t have his colors down. It’s possible she just didn’t want to sort any more poms. I wouldn’t worry about it until she’s a bit older.
My Dad once brought home one of those colour-blind test collections and the whole family gave them a try. Amongst all my siblings and parents, I was the only one who was red-green colourblind.
There could be another explanation, too. If the girl in question is 23 months old, then she’s probably entering the Terrible Twos stage…which means that she got bored with sorting by color and didn’t want to do it any more. Sometimes toddlers just get tired of a game, even if they are mentally capable of doing whatever it is…sorting colors, in this case.
Longshot: Well Christmas was just about a month ago. Maybe she remembers that and thinks red and green belong together.
Harrrr, she definitely might have been tired of sorting and definitely remembers Christmas. Every time I tell her grandma is coming to visit she says “Presents? Bows? Ornaments?”
I used to go tie shopping with my best friend, and I always forgot he was red-green color blind. It was maddening.
I’m female and I have deuteranopia (which, according to Wikipedia, 0.4% of females have).
The only impact it has on my life is that I’m a bit of a boring dresser, as I default to pretty plain colors so I don’t clash. Oh, and both my optometrist and a few friends of mine who are designers think it’s incredibly cool and like to test me out on things.
I was once one of five chemists, trying to read a pH strip (changes color by pH). All of us were color blind. It was kinda crazy.
I’d suggest that the OP checks her husband’s color vision; I didn’t know I was colorblind until I was in my 30s. Muddy greens and green-browns all look the same to me – have him pick out colors from camouflage samples.
Yup, this is by far the most likely explanation if the daughter is indeed colorblind.
To all those with unusual color perception:
How do the colors you do not percieve as others do appear to you? If you are red-green colorblind, do red and green look alike? Do they resemble any other color? Are they simply gray or black?
In my case, which may not be much of anything at all, I’m somewhat insensitive to blue, which turns to grey in lighter shades, and black in darker ones. I can still distinquish things which are heavily blue in color, but all blue green mixes look like green to me. Blue red mixes are a little difficult to distinquish between, but I can certainly tell them apart from pure red.
She’s probably just fucking with you. Get used to it.
Related question. I always thought it was much more uncommon for women to be color blind. It that true and by how much? My brother is very color blind and I am not. How common is that?
As I was driving to pick my daughter up from play school just now, I remembered the phenomenon of X-inactivation. I wondered how that would play with female colorblindness… but apparently up to a quarter of genes on the X chromosome are exempt from inactivation in humans Wikipedia link. Color blindness and male pattern baldness are probably two of them, huh?
Loach: a man is color blind if he inherits a CB X chromosome from his mother. For a woman to be color blind, she has to inherit the CB chromosome from both parents. So if the chance of a man being color blind is x, then the chance of a woman being color blind is x^2.
ETA, men always inherit color blindness from their mothers. So sons of a woman who carries one CB X and one normal X (like me) have a 50% chance of inheriting the CB X and a 50% chance of not.
Side track:
About 4 years ago I heard of a scientist that had had successfully given monkeys color vision by injecting the DNA (or maybe some type fo retro-virus, I’m not sure) responsible for the missing structures in the monkey’s eyes (rods and cones I guess). After a few months, the little buggers were seeing in color.
Anyone know who I’m talking about, and if I can have my eyes injected with monkey color vision DNA viruses yet?
Instead of making a mess of quoting everybody, I will start referencing post #22 on.
Jeff Lichtman - I know most XXY and XYY guys are unaware of their genes. But wouldn’t AIS genetic male/physical female people be detected very early?
gracer - -anomalies and -opias don’t usually morph to the other kind. The former is also much harder to detect, as the deficit is so minor it rarely comes up.
Also, the “grouwn” term may be made up by him, but the concept has related terms.
Leo Bloom - simple solution: have him convert to Mormonism. Then it’s skinny black ties every day! If he doesn’t want to go that far, he can always become a hipster.
Lightray - wow what are the odds? Does that say something about chemists, like how you might find more Asperger’s people in computer programming or something? As for camouflage - it does give some colorblind people an advantage, the camouflage sticks out like a sore thumb.
TriPolar - as CB people can not see what tritanopes see, and vice versa, it’s hard to compare. But I think Lightray’s explanation is the best that you can make. Like you know how you see two colors, call both blue, but one is obviously closer to aqua and the other closer to indigo? Or a pure red and a slight desaturated pinkish-red are both red? It’s like that, you can tell the difference based on brightness, except that colors like red and green now fall in the same category, so more confusions can be made. Everybody has metamers, colors which looks the same but are completely different physical. CB people have more of them.
Loach - most forms of r-g colorblindness have incidences in the single digits in males, and less than 1% in females. B-y is equal in males/females, I believe fewer than 1/1000 people. The most common is deuteranomaly, I’ve heard in the 5-8% range in males, much lower in females. It is rarer in females because they normally have to get two copies on each X chromosome requiring a color blind dad and cb mom or carrier mom.
Barring any mutation, half siblings, or weird family history, two male siblings each have a 50/50 chance of getting normal forms. 25% chance of that combo unless my math is way of. So common if the mom has the gene. If you were female, it would be expected.
Well, while it’s rare for females to have actual RG colorblindness, it’s the opinion of some that even female carriers of the gene can have some color deficiencies. I’m fairly sure that’s what happened in my case.
I am a carrier (father was RG colorblind) and a female, and several years ago when I was doing a course on gemstone color-grading for GIA, I found that my color vision seemed to have some limits compared to normal - very desaturated tones of red and green seemed much more similar in color than they should have been. Gemstone color grading involves a lot of comparing of similar shades of the same colors, identifying color saturation levels, etc… and when I started finding these anomalies in my color vision, I started tracking it to see exactly what I was seeing compared to the color standards.
The differences were not a lot, mind you, maybe 2-5% less color vision at the very lowest levels, but it was measurable, and most likely attributable to being an RG carrier.
Okay, I have red-green color blindness. I do have a daughter, but she is adopted and of no genetic relationship to me at all. So, for color blindness, she doesn’t count.
I do have a son who is genetically mine. His mother does not have the color blindness gene. My son (now seventeen years old) does not display any signs of color blindness. Will his sons or daughters be color blind? Will his daughters be carriers?
You donated your Y chromosome to your son, and your color blindness is on your X chromosome, so he’s not color blind because him mom isn’t a carrier (or if she is he got her non-carrying X chromosome). However, if your son has a boy baby with a woman who is a carrier, there is a chance that he will be color blind, since his son will get his X chromosome from her. If you have a biological daughter, she will have your X chromosome and will be a carrier. If that’s confusing, these inheritability charts will explain it better.