**You seem to be taking my comments personal. I did not start this thread saying anything about you and whether or not you did anything wrong.**



Don't mistake my willingness to defend my opinion as taking something personally.



** I started this to make the point that documentation is only as good as the documentor and the believing of it is only as good as people believe those that did the documentation.**



A point which I too have made on several occasions. We agree.



**My comment about the speckles and trip alternates came from your comment about how "normal" marked specimens in the wild must have some sort of advantage and that is why we normally see them. The oddball marked specimens are not seen because they do not make it in the wild. If no one is finding a wild Hueco with trip alternates your hypothosis would indicate that we are not seeing them because they are not making it in the wild. If they are not making it in the wild then sooner or later they would deplete the population enough over time that they would not have a viable genetic strain to reproduce.



Yes, sooner or later. However, recessive genes are nearly impossible to eliminate from the genome. They will remain forever. Further, if I can anthropomorphize a 'genome' it would be to the benefit of the specieS to keep the traits present, even if they are not evolutionarily beneficial at the time. There is no reason to believe that the environmental pressures might not change in the future to make the trait that is currently selected against MORE desireable in the future.



**That is different from your examples because we do not kill off those with the syndroms you named so their genes stay in the pool and are passed on to next generations.**



Ok, let me use another example. Humans with spina biffida don't survive to reproduce...why are individuals still being born?



**As far as the Huecos with the significant speckles and trip alternates, too bad there is not enough data to be positive. **



I agree. But until we have more data, why doubt Dan Johnson?

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