Posted by:
vjl4
at Fri Nov 19 14:02:52 2010 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by vjl4 ]
While I still don't fully agree that a Snow is literally showing both Albino and Axanthic colors at once and yet somehow appear to blend and come across as a Snow colored individual, to me, I presume that the blending is happening in much the same way as it does in Incomplete Dominance traits despite the gene loci and recessiveness of the traits, I just can't understand how it would happen otherwise.
Ah, I think I see what you are getting at now. A snow, for example, is actually not "showing" anything. Neither are albino nor axanthic for that matter. Its an absence of both red and black, since these pigments are missing what we are observing can not be a blending of something since there is no red or black pigment to blend.
This can happen because red and black pigments are chemically very different and are produced by different pathways in the cell. Different cells are responsible for making the different pigments.
Its kind of like a pixelated picture, seen from very close all you can see are individual dots of color. But seen from very far away they appear to blend to produce an image and you can no longer see the individual dots. They are still there as individual dots of color, but our eyes do not have the resolution to see them. What we are seeing from far away is actually an optical illusion. Were we to have eyes and a brain that could process really high resolution images we might actually see a snow differently, perhaps instead of the optical illusion of blending we would see dots (cells) of missing red and dots (cells) of missing black on a background of dots of some other color.
I hope I did not go too far over the edge with that explanation  Vinny ----- “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” -C. Darwin, 1859
Natural Selection Reptiles
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