Ever think that my spider may be more adapted to this world then your normal?

[MrLang]

This is true. However there are two sides to this arguement. Sickle cell does reduce the fitness of an individual and they are likely not to live beyond 30-40-50 years tops. But in an area where they may have died of malaria before they were able to have children this would have given them the advantage of growing old enough to reproduce therefore continueing the human race. This is why sickle cell is so prevalent within certain populations.

This is a pretty cool scenario in the human population. I come from a school of thought where people considered humans to have stopped being selected for a long time ago, so forgive me if I came off as not being on board with what you're saying. I don't disagree with you, but I don't have enough specific knowledge on it to really say much else about it. I think you agree with me on the larger point I was trying to draw attention to, which is about dumb luck. What makes the spider gene different from other evolutionary adaptations is that it hasn't 'proven' itself as superior and most likely never will. Based on what we know about why BPs act and are colored the way they are, it seems unlikely to be able to safely speculate that they WOULD have an advantage that would be considered evolutionary in their native habitat .

@Mike - Sorry, I mentioned in my first post that I only care enough to point out that your theory is less than rational and unsupported, to be polite. You're the one carrying the burden of proof and took it on with your opening post.

The last thing I'll throw out there to consider is whether or not we'd even be having this discussion if the color pattern on the spider morph looked like a normal bp color. Would you breed wobbly normals and market them as such? Do you think people would buy them? Come on...

Going to respectfully dip out at this time, as this is going nowhere fast. Domepiece- cool stuff. I'm going to check out more about sickle cell. I'm curious to know how high the percent of sickle carriers can get in the most highly selected community.