I agree, I don't think the friend is "stupid" or anything, he's just flat-out wrong. I hope he extrapolated this idea from lecture material, and that this was not something a teacher told him.

I don't think you can really call a gene "weak." Yes, some traits make organisms less likely to thrive, but the genes in and of themselves are not weak, and certainly the animal's genome is not going to change and make it albino just because it has some deleterious alleles at important genes that govern its success at survival and reproduction. If this were the case, the cats at our shelters with neurological disorders would be albino, as would humans with DS, or even severe autism.

Natural selection cannot act on the genes themselves, only on the phenotype of the individual animal once it's out in the world. Your friend is suggesting that somehow animals are being selected against and "targeted" for consumption by predators before they are even born, and this is simply just not so.


v