Love the different opinions and everyone's ability to play nicely in this thread (so far)!! I won't say much as to avoid beating too many dead horses but I will say the following:
1) As to the homozygous spider, we truly do not know, and to say otherwise is incorrect, plain and simple.
2) No one has mentioned that a lethal combination doesn't have to be a slug egg, which suprises me! In the case of Spiders - If it is lethal when sperm first combines with an egg then no egg will be laid, slug or otherwise, as the female can simply absorb the egg back into her body and make good use of the nutrients on the remaining healthy eggs!! If sperm isn't even able to fertilize an egg with the same allele(prezygotic exclusion) then a sperm with a normal set of DNA could do the job instead, producing a viable spider egg.
While you may not agree, keep in mind that my BS is in a biological field and that I have taken both genetics and biological statistics at the college level. As a result I feel like what I have to say should hold some wieght. Whether you agree with what I said or not doesn't matter to me either way, I just wanted to weigh in.
To the OP - thanks for a thought provoking post! It is by raising interesting questions that cause us to seek answers that ultimately broadens our knowledge base (so long as we are open to what we find, whether it is what we expected to find or not!)
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