Brown seems to be such a default colour for things in nature and in day to life. Why is it so common for things to be or turn this colour in contrast to the vast array of other colours around?
In: Earth Science
There are some correct answers here to *How* brown occurs in nature, put plainly there are chemical reasons, but I think *Why* it occurs more abstractly is interesting and worth thinking about.
Part of the *WHY* is that sight is a really complicated phenomenon that evolved over hundreds of millions of years. During that time frame plants and animals were establishing themselves world wide and paving the way for millions of species that would evolve from those early ancestors.
So in the same time frame that sight is born into the world, so are the basic building blocks of every species with absolutely no regard for color. Sight gave early adopters an advantage but its only after sight is relatively common that plants and animals start evolving ways to take advantage.
Therefore, color wasn’t significant to survival until several hundred million years into the evolutionary process. Following this logic we can say that other colors only appear in systems/organisms that evolved post-sight. This is why vibrant colors are often associated with complex behaviors like a specialized diet, mate selection and camouflage.
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