Hi there.
This is interesting, but this could be "genetics" only on an advanced level. I'm just speculating here, but we know that certain animals do change their coloring to fit their environments, usually for camouflage. I've wondered white the white polar bears are that color if originally there had been no snow before the flood.
So perhaps it does work out that herd animals will produce young of varying colors in later generations if they change their habitat and see certain colors when they do. Maybe this is a gentics phenomenon that Jacob knew about and triggered this response.
What I'm suggesting is that say a pure white flock, likely herding on the desert were suddenly put into an environment of high-contrasting colors, then the flock would eventually adapt the coloring of that environment in order not to contrast with it too much for their own protection. That's just a theory but that would explain why polar bears are all white and brown bears are brown.
One way we could test this is to put a flock of brown bears in the artic where it's all white and see if subsequent generations would turn pure white or not.
So there might be something genetic to all of this after all that we haven't fully explored. But I think, generally, animals do tend to take on the colors of their environment and where the animal mates and the colors around them might affect some suppression of certain genetic strains and encourage others that determines the outcome.
It could be similar to male and female sperm. The male sperm are thin-headed and swim fast. The female sperm are thicker headed and swim slow. Depending upon the acidic levels in the fallopian tubes and uterus, though, a more acidic environment favors one or the other. You can look this up in one of the old Awake! magazines, but I think it was explained that the higher acid content would kill off the male sperm because they were thin-headed, but the female sperm were slower dying because of being larger and thus more resistant to the acidic environment and thus would survive to fertilize an egg.
On the other hand, if the environment was not so acidic, the male sperm, being faster swimmers, would increase the chance of being male.
ON THE OTHER HAND, though, Jacob simply could have imagined that the stripped wood was the cause of the variations, when, in fact, the sap from the wood itself was the cause. Don't forget he actually put it in their drining troughs so they were exposed to the juices of those trees. It could be that some chemical elements in the juices caused some birth defects which showed up in the distorted coloring of the sheep or increased the chemical environment in the womb of the female sheep that favored the multi-colored animals. That is, maybe there is a difference in the sperm of white sheep versus colored sheep and that is affected by the uterus environment which can be altered by drugs found in these branches which caused this temporary high acidic or alkaline content in the blood of the animals and when they mated, somehow, this decreased the faster-swimming white sperm or something.
I'm just speculating, trying to find a scientific explanation for the phenomenon.
At any rate, only duplicating the test would determine this. We should go ask a German scientist if they have experimented with changing the coloring of animals with different chemicals. If so, then you have a possible partial answer.
Thanks for the interesting discussion.
But I find with most of these posts, especially yours, that it is not a limitation in the scriptures that is revealed but a limitation in the thinking ability of the person making the post.
It's a scientific fact that no-so-smart-people, are far more confounded by science than their smarter counterparts. (smile)
LG
