Colour blindness is a false term; there is no actual blindness involved. Instead, colour blindness describes a deficiency in the way an individual sees colour or colour differences. This deficiency occurs thanks to underdeveloped retinal cones responsible for perceiving colour in light and relaying that information to the optic nerve.
An Englishman by the name of John Dalton published a paper on the topic after realizing that he himself was colour blind back in 1798; this was the first formal publication on the topic after which some people adopted the term “Daltonism” to describe the condition.
8 percent of Males and only 0.5 percent of females are colour blind in some way. This is because colour blindness is inherited through a mutation in the X chromosome which carries many of the genes related to vision. Colour blindness is so rare in females because as long as one of the X chromosomes is normally coded, then vision will be normal, whereas males, who have only one X chromosome, will be colour blind if it is defective. A father cannot pass on colour blindness to his son because he does not contribute an X chromosome; however, a man may have a daughter with a defective X chromosome (who is just a carrier because her other one is normal) and then pass on the defective X chromosome to her son (who will then be colour blind).
There has been research conducted which has concluded that colour blind individuals possess a heightened ability to see through colour camouflages which is said to explain the evolutionary aspect of why so many people are red-green colour blind.
Being colour blind may limit one’s career choice where the most talked about instance of this involves flying planes. A pilot has a lot of responsibility and almost all of the controls they use to fly a plane work with some sort of colour-coded signal. While there are careers like being a pilot that cannot be legally pursued, there are other occupations that should be avoided for practical reasons; for instance, operating a paint mixer or being an electrician, which involves identifying resistors based on their band colours, would not be advisable. This condition also creeps into daily life in almost everything, from purchasing clothes to trying to tell if the meat you just cooked is still pink in the middle. Driving also has the potential to be challenging when you consider the many colours of road signs and, most notably, the lights at intersections. Actually, in Romania they don’t allow people who are colour blind to get their driver’s license.
In summary, colour blind individuals do not see in black and white and the most annoying question that someone can ask them is “what colour is this?”
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