>>8-How would you explain there being baby anerys in a population with no anery adults, AND green adults with no green babies?



jeff, i'm generally sympathetic to your side in this discussion, but there's an easy explanation for the first part of question #8: when a recessive gene deviates from the norm, and produces a change that will ultimately change the color of the animal, it first occurs as a het. As a new morph reproduces in a population, it's entirely logical that there would be many, many more het than homozygous animals in the population. Someone might find an amel of species xxx, and we might say "oh, look, an albino occurred." But the real evolutionary event was that A HET occurred. That event, and many subsequent ones as the number/percentage of hets increased, just isn't observable. When two hets finally bump into each other and reproduce, then there's an amel, and for the first time the genetic change has become observable.



Now, why there are green adults and no green babies? That's harder to explain from a genetic standpoint, so it's good you're working on it. But ontogenetic changes occur, i suppose, in all species? Just one example, the snow honduran trait is basically silver and white as a hatchling: As adults, they're yellow and white, or pink and yellow and white, etc. No one's seen a pink, yellow and white baby snow honduran.



Just some thoughts to ponder.

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