I have this What If? idea for a Slice of Life story in my head about a setting where the majority of humanity are blind including the protagonist. Given the fact, writing a story about a world where most people have no concept of sight, light, darkness, color, etc, would be a challenge to write since that means avoiding sensory words that require sight, I'm not sure how I should write how the world works exactly (maybe because I have so many ideas...) or whether it would be best to use a third person or first person POV.

Could humanity even function as a species without sight ?

Yeah, that'd be the problem with the premise. You could, however, make them rubber-forehead aliens of some sort that can't see but has some other sense enhanced.

They would have to have invented braille long ago, that much is for sure. They may very well have no concept of day or night per say.

An interesting question would be if they ever invented fire. Warmth might make it worth having, but with no need for a light source, there'd be less of a point.

They would likely never develop astronomical science, or even be aware of what stars are, at least not for a very long time. Likewise, they'd probably never invent the calendar, navigation technology, meteorology, or flight. Vehicles in general, they'd have a real problem with. Not being able to invent a calendar would be something of a death knell for agriculture.

If they have a sense that helps replace their sight, that might help (animals tend to know what time of year it is, despite not having a calendar). Though, they'd still have trouble with navigation, meteorology, astronomy, and vehicles.

Idioms: One common real-world synonym for "I understand what you're saying" is "I see." But since they don't have sight, they would probably say "I hear you" (which is another thing people say in the real world).

I'm actually really curious about how this will affect sighted people. Will they be akin to wizards, or more like raving soothsayers? How will sighted people try to describe color — or light, for that matter — when their entire culture has no concept for it? What happens when two sighted people meet? Will they frantically try to understand their "power" and get excited over colors and lights and shapes?

Assuming you get past the obvious hurdle of "Humans rely on sight," then how will this affect daily life? Infrastructure? I imagine roads would have to be carefully marked with grooves or something so that wheel-based transport wouldn't veer off the path. How are cities constructed when everybody relies on sound, smell, touch, and (to a lesser extent) taste?

Do other animals still have sight? Because if not, that will cause major problems for both transportation and agriculture.

And the more advanced this culture gets, the more you're going to have to think long and hard about how they got there. A medieval civilization could probably get by being blind, but a modern-tech civilization will be much more complicated. (DISCLAIMER: I am fully aware that people are super intelligent and could probably figure these things out if it actually happened. I just want you to know that it'll be harder on you as a worldbuilder/story-crafter.)

Good luck on this. It sounds interesting.

edited 20th Jun '15 6:08:21 AM by AwSamWeston

First thought goes to The Day of the Triffids.

Second thought is humanity would be screwed. Colour vision (is that berry ripe? Is that meat ripe?) and visual-spatial reasoning are couple of the things we're actually good at. We don't use it so much for throwing ourselves at tree branches any more but to throw branches at other things.

But assuming we get over those hurdles:

Perhaps they'd develop echolocation to the level that they don't walk into things. Which some blind people do learn how to do.

I think fire would be invented but it would be closer to a "only when neccessary" tool, requiring professional training. Without sight it is a bit of an eldritch being, able to grow and consume and jump/teleport. So probably not for everyday cooking. Which means humans need to eat more raw food.

Calendars would still be invented. There's still the seasons for the year's overall shape, and the day/night cycle would be felt as cool/warm. Though inside buildings and caves might be thought as akin to evernight. Any coastal populations would still have the tides to contend with too.

How often would a blind person pretended to see? Especially if there's an elevation of status involved? I mean a simple test would be to recognise shapes at a distance. The tester knows they're holding a triangle (they can feel it in their hand) the ritual is done at the heat of the day (apparently the mystic sight works on heat) and the claimant has to guess.

Music would be interesting. With no visual arts it probably would get more focus. But listening to music puts you in danger since can drown out other noises. Plus a large scale concert could attract unwanted attention you wouldn't hear coming. Back on the first hand, music as a synchronising agent (working chants, drums, etc.) probably would be even more common.

The problem with the calendar is that most calendars were built by observing the sky, which they'd have trouble studying. For example, someone realized "Oh, the moon goes through a cycle of changing shape 12 times before the seasons restart" and built a calendar around it. Using the sun to track the seasons was also pretty common.

Okay, straight-up blind is hard to do, it's like a bloodhound without a sense of smell, or a deaf bat. I'd go so far as to say that it's impossible to do, a culture of mostly blind humans would die out unless they were basically pets of say a machine people.

Yeah, survival may be possible on an individual level, but civilization would be right out.

It depends on the blind-seeing ratio, I suppose. I can see civilization stumbling along if the ratio is something like 1 sighted person for every 4 blind people. The sighted people could guide the blind and lead them.

Which'd probably develop in sighted men being seen as royals or prophets.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

It would probably all depend on in what way the majority of humanity is blind. If there's a naturally high incidence of blindness at birth, and so the world has had centuries to evolve without sight, or if the blindness has happened fairly recently (a couple of hundred years ago, or maybe less) and hasn't readapted.

H. G. Wells had a story like that, "The Country of the Blind". But Wells was a pessimist in ways (sorta like how Tony Stark is always the first person to build a variable threat response suit), and I don't agree with how that would necessarily introduce creative sterility in the progression of technology.

I think a first-person would be the easiest to get a reader into, but the third-person would be easier on the writer.

As for the ratio of blind to "sighted" people, I'm thinking of something between 1/2 - 3/4 of the population. In other words, a little more than half of the population are blind. Sorry, for being unclear.

Soo, anyways, the human population in my story would be somewhere around 60 thousand. The earth is mostly populated by flora and fauna

Ideas

• I'm thinking of making blindness a dominant genetic trait.
• Hundreds of years before the story took place, the human population was around 3 million.

edited 21st Jun '15 4:25:47 PM by MacronNotes

If the sighted are common enough that everybody knows a sighted person, there isn't going to be that much of a difference, cultural, historical, or technological. The main thing is that creating accommodations for so many blind people would be a constant challenge.

If I were doing a setting where the majority of a race was blind, I would go with a dystopian, X-men style plot. The main character had a mutation that causes them to develop sight later in life. The State/Society is afraid of the sighted (basically, they're Bewaring the Superman; they fear a "sighted rebellion"/takeover of the world), causing them to become a fugitive.

If you make blindness a dominant trait, then the children of two sighted people will always be sighted. Would that elevate those family lines?

Is the decline from 3 million to 60 thousand linked to the event (or the same as) which cause the blindness? Because that's going to have ramifications by itself.

Also even with a minor amount of selection, with a dozen generations the sighted will out number the blind. If you want to keep a steady blind population you need to give some advantage to being blind. Whether that's for being homozygous (both copies of your gene are the same) or heterozygous (copies are different). For instance, the alleles for sickle cell anaemia hang around because while being homozygous for them is really bad, being heterozygous makes you able to survive malaria with less severe symptoms.

If blindness is dominant trait lets call the allele that causes it B, and the allele for sightedness b. I'm going to begin with the Hardy-Weinberg Principle which says that: f(BB):f(Bb):f(bb) = f(B)²:2f(B)f(b):f(b)². (Here f(x) is the frequency of x. So f(bb) is the sighted recessives, f(b) is the sighted allele over the whole population.)

Since sightedness is recessive then the frequency of sighted people is f(bb) and equal to the square of the frequency of the sight allele itself. So if half can see then f(b) is 70.7%, if only a quarter can then it's 50%. Let's go with the only quarter can see.

Then the frequency of blind:sighted is 3:1. The ration of f(BB):f(Bb):f(bb) is 25%:50%:25% or 1:2:1. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium requires several things, the most important of which is no selection. The next generation can be found by these equations:
f_n+1(BB)=f_n(BB)²+f_n(BB)*f_n(Bb)
f_n+1(Bb)=0.5*f_n(Bb)²+f_n(BB)*f_n(Bb)+2*f_n(BB)*f_n(bb)+f_n(Bb)*f_n(bb)
f_n+1(bb)=f_n(bb)²+f_n(bb)*f_n(Bb)

You can put a step in to account for selection. Normally multiplying the f_n() results by their relative fitness. The best gets 1 (so sighted) and the rest get how they compare (so both f(BB) and f(Bb) get the same, since their phenotype is the same). If you say only 5% of the blind people fail to have kids compared to sighted people, the directional selection will have a sighted majority (51%) in eleven generations (approx 220-275 years).

If you get rid of any heterozygotes (so f(Bb)=0) to start with it takes much longer. Eleven generations only brings the sighted from a quarter up to a third.

If you start with a half-sighted population in eleven generations 69.4% will be sighted. (Curiously for the non-heterozygous population it takes that many generations to recover from the initial drop due to carrier blind people. The first generation of 50%:0:50% is 23%:50%:28%).

My knowledge in genetics is limited (so feel free to correct anything I'll say here) but does blindness being dominant even make sense ? Usually an allele is recessive when it doesn't create whatever protein the dominant allele does. If there is one allele that doesn't work and the other that does, the protein will still be created.

The first assumption is that blindness is caused by a lack of some protein used by the photosensitive cells. Thus blindness should be recessive. If it is dominant, it must mean the gene create a protein that suppresses sight ; why would it exist in the first place ?

edited 22nd Jun '15 4:00:21 AM by Aetol

Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. The same protein that in small amounts causes a benefit to the bearer of the gene can cause serious damage if there's too much of it. See also: Any gland hyperfunction ever.

The dominant version could prevent the creation/function of the proper protein. Such as a protein that misbinds with the recessive version stopping it from doing its job. So only double recessives are okay. (Though that model can lead to codominance rather than full dominance, since there is kind of a 25% chance of two working proteins binding together without interference from a broken one). Also the allele could be a regulatory protein which is basically a free pass to be dominant/recessive/positive/negative/whatever. Protein regulation is crazy.

A lot of vision related genes are on the x-chromosome. So if it's blindness dominant you might a higher proportion of males to be sighted^* Males can't be heterozygous for x-linked genes so their frequencies equal the overall populations. Females need to be homozygous recessive so f(bb)=f(b)^2 which since the allele frequency is less than one the homozygous frequency must be less than that, and less than the males. Does make it less obvious how to predict if the children of a pair will be sighted or not. (Sighted father will have sighted daughters half the time if the mother is a blind carrier of the recessive, and has no effect on his sons' sightedness. Sighted mother will have sighted sons, but sighted daughters only if the father can see).

edited 22nd Jun '15 5:50:39 AM by Luthen

@Protagnist 506: I'm not really interested in doing a dystopia or anything like that. I wanted to do something like a Slice of Life, so I can focus more on exploring how the story's world functions and how people in the story live their lives.

@Luthen: Thank you for the detailed genetics work, that helped a lot. I was gonna try to do some work on it myself but my genetics knowledge kinda limited to just Punnett Squares

Anyways, I'm trying to get my brain together so I can merge a lot of the great suggestions in this thread with some of my own so I can make a big post of the ideas I have... So please stand by. ^_^

edited 22nd Jun '15 10:59:05 AM by MacronNotes

One possibility could be that this takes place [After The End] and humanity lives underground. through generations of living in little to no visibility, sight becomes a thing of the past.

And then Darwinian selection plays in, and despite being a dominant gene, 'B' becomes a rare gene as its carriers die sooner than those with the double-recessive 'b'.

Do they ? If the society is adapted to that situation there's no reason for the blind people to die significantly sooner.

We're talking humans here, not some sort of echolocating aliens, so yes, blindness offers a significant disadvantage over sight.

Yes, but humans live in society and look out for each other. A handicap like this isn't that big a survival/reproductive disadvantage, compared to what it would be for any other animal.

edited 23rd Jun '15 2:26:57 AM by Aetol

It is the moment there's any kind of economic crisis. The wealthy and powerful in general prioritize remaining wealthy and powerful over saving the less fortunate, which means the charity the unseeing majority will rely on might very well dry up in a hurry.

But aside from the survival aspect of selection, consider the social ones. The sighted will be vastly advantaged in just about every way, which will in turn position them as rather desirable, leading to greater reproductive success. On top of that, they'll have an easier time affording proper child care and education to maximize said reproductive success.