There is so much wrong with your post. >I'm fairly certain the colors of light were there a bit before our eyes evolved. Light existed before humans. Colors,

There is so much wrong with your post. >I'm fairly certain the colors of light were there a bit before our eyes evolved. Light existed before humans. Colors, as seen by humans can only exist when humans do. In my worldview, colors are signals in our brain, corresponding to light of particular wavelength entering our eyes. >I'm not certain, however, that RGB was chosen because of the trichromatic nature of our biology. I'm pretty sure that you need at least three base colors to represent all of the colorspace (most) humans can see. If we used less base colors, we simply would not be able show some colors on the monitor. It happens so that we have receptors for red, green and blue light [0]. IMO, choosing these as base colors would be a good idea. >when you combine those three wavelengths, you get white You get "white" as perceived by humans, but Mantis shrimp [1] would see that it is different from sunlight. >Choosing others would result in, well, not white. You can get "white" from any pair of complementary colors. But combining these would not cover all of visible colorspace. You can get "white" from any three linearly independent colors (if you allow subtracting). You can choose any basis for colorspace as long as three colors are linearly independent. You can write a transform matrix from one basis to another. In some cases, these transformation matrices are simple (cmyk -> rgb), in some cases (rbg -> YCbCr), they are not. >I would attribute this more towards the fact that our sun happens to consist of particular elements No, it has to do with the fact that light emitted by Sun is very close to black-body radiation [2], and it only depends on temperature of the Sun's surface. There are absorption lines [3] corresponding to some elements in Sun's atmosphere, but you don't see them with a naked eye. I hope you learned something new today. [0] http://www.normankoren.com/Human_spectral_sensitivity_small.jpg http://www.normankoren.com/Human_spectral_sensitivity_small.... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp [2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Solar_Spectrum.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Solar_Spe... [3] http://cseligman.com/text/sun/sunspectrum.jpg http://cseligman.com/text/sun/sunspectrum.jpg