Is colour blindness a good thing?

My husband and my father are both color blind, and I always find myself frustrated with their inability to make out the same colors that I can. Trying to choose paint for the walls or any comparable task becomes impossible, because so many colors look muted, brownish, or “ugly” in their eyes.
However, if it works for you… and you can see the positive, I say run with it.

i painted my daughters room and they loved the colour saying is was sooooo girly, it was lilac and all i could see was sea blue,

I can’t see (get it?) an advantage but most likely there is one. Aren’t rods faster than cones? Maybe, when your ancestors swung from the trees they were able to pick out predator or prey movement a few millisecond quicker than the other guy who was stoned out by the colored sky. Your color blind anscetor passed on the gene while the other guy became food.
At the rate medical science is advancing, this might be “cured” in a few years.
The results from the controversial human genome project have reduced the cost of DNA and gene mapping from $1,000,000 per map to around $500.
I’m betting in 10 years, for a substantial fee, you’ll be offered the choice whether to stay with the inability to tell if those Manolo Blahnik pumps are fushia or lilac colored WalMart knock-offs or not.
I can see a genetic advantage to not caring.

Thanks to this technology, I have a test plot of a genetically modified energy crop growing on my back field right now. (Yield numbers will be presented in February.)

Color blind gene modification in monkey

When offered, I’m signing up for the “grow a new prostate” testing. ;-)

I think it just is the way that you are.

I like seeing all colors, but I imagine that you don’t miss them since you have never been able to see them.

Since many color coded things are also location coded, such the green light is always at the bottom, and the red on top, or picture coded, the exit sign has an arrow as well as a bright color, I can’t see that it hurts.

Our eyes can detect and discriminate between a certain range of light frequencies. We call that seeing colors. We can’t see beyond the infrared or ultraviolet. Perhaps if we did, that would be useful. But as it is, we need to develop special detectors for that.

You could have a detector that tells you the wavelength of the light you are looking at. It could help you discriminate between things, if it were that important.You’ve lost purple? Well, you must be able to tell where it is, because that’s where you can’t really see color. Still, you can’t get a full range of information out of it.

Is this a disadvantage? Probably. It means you can collect less information about the world. That always puts you at a disadvantage. People are always saying we should use our common sense. I say our common sense is only as good as the knowledge behind it. The more knowledge and information I have, the better decisions I can make.

So, no. I don’t think color blindness is a good thing. However, I do think you can compensate for it, and those compensations might give you some advantages over others.