Quote Originally Posted by PythonWallace
I hear you, but hybrids take it a big step beyond your arguments. I understand that breeding in captivity passes along genetics that might not be favorable or even chosen in nature, but at least you can breed a morph to a normal, get normal looking snakes and be positive that the snakes you have are 100% ball pythons. This isn't the case when species start to become hybridized in captivity.
If the animals will not be released into the wild and any responsible keeper knows they shouldnt be then I still fail to see a compelling reason to differentiate captive normals, morphs, or hybrids.

If someone can produce a captive blood piebald they way you are saying, more power to them.

This may be a bit off-topic...but I share anyway since I thought it was really interesting.

We know from experimental evidence and Mendel's laws of genetics that it is possible to recapture the parental types from an F1 hybrid x F1 hybrid cross. How difficult it is to do this depends on the number of different genes between the two species. For example if the differences between the two species that produced the F1 was only 1 gene then you'd have a 1/4 chance of getting at least 1 offspring that looked like one of the parental species. For two genes it would be a 1/16 chance. For three genes, a 1/64 chance.

For any F1 x F1 hybrid cross...the frequency of the parental species being recovered in the F2 generation (assuming only independently assorting Mendelian genetic factors) is (1/4)^n, where n is number of gene differences between the two species.

People have done genetic archeology experiments with F1 x F1 hybrid crosses to estimate the number of genes between different species. For example, George Beadle raised 50,000 F2 plants from an F1 teosinte (wild corn) and corn maize hybrid cross and found that about 1/500 looked the corn or teosinte parent.

This means that there are approximately 4-5 gene that differ between wild and domesticated corn. So only a small number of genes need to be different in order for a paleontologist or zoologist to classify an organism as a different species. This means that the number of genes between and ball and say an Angolan python might not be that different as well. This also means that the number of genetic variants between recovering a wild-type from a morph x morph cross and a parental type from F1 x F1 hybrid cross isn't off by that much. This isnt surprising since its based off the same laws of heredity.

If you want to watch the lecture I learned about this stuff from see this video.

He talks about the genetic archelogy experiements with corn starting at about 6:30 of the video, continues the talk with similiar experiments on dog breeds and a talk on how a paleontologist would classify different dog breeds as different species simply by looking at the gross anatomical differences in skeletal structures to about 25 min. Large gene differences don't need to really exist for us to classify different organisms as different species.