Hmm. I reread my post, and didn't think it was all that confusing. :? Mainly what I'm getting at is that sometimes spontaneous mutations do occur. I wasn't really talking about a "throw back". My main point was closer to the end of my post, which I know can be lost due to fatigue, since I can get carried away sometimes. Anyway, what I'm saying is that the gene, or genes that could make an otherwise normal carpet have blue coloration, could quite easily pop up due to mutation at anytime. My guess would be that at some point, it may very well have happened in the wild. Evolution being the beast that it is, weeded this hypothetical blue snake out. Chances are, he didn't survive for very long. He was too easy to spot by predators or something. Died before he could pass on his blue genes. Poof. Gone.
These little "experiments" of nature are what drives evolution. I wouldn't be so quick to scoff at my 5000 year reference, even though it was simply an arbitrary number I threw out there. It was sort of meant to be ridiculous. But when you talk about evolutionary changes, there are really two aspects of it. You can say it took so many millions of years to evolve from primitive primates to man. That is a pretty complex change, with many overlapping species and subspecies, involving many, many mutations. That obviously takes a long time. But there is the other way of looking at it, which is one single mutation at a time. A single mutation can indeed stabilize within a local population quite quickly.
Also, when you talk about a human mutating into an ape, you are talking about something else completely. Take our closest primate relative, the chimp. They share somewhere in the neighborhood of 98.5% of our DNA. To mutate 1.5% of your genetic makeup in a single generation is absurd. But, if you take it one gene at a time, you see it all the time. One guy has slightly longer toes than average. Another guy is really hairy. Yet another is really short. And of course we all know that there are plenty of people out there with sub-standard intelligence.
What I'm getting at is that it is one thing to say that there aren't any known blue carpets, but to rule it out is somewhat narrow minded. Nobody as of yet has completely mapped any reptile genome, much less the a carpet python specifically.
As far as intergrades, I personally find this practice to be a very bad thing, and would fully support a ban on it. Line breeding is something else altogether. If done correctly, it can be beneficial to your stock. It is generally thought of as a way to bring out a specific trait, but it can just as effectively be used to get rid of undesirable traits as well.
