Ok, so I found out that even though mylist[] and all objects in it were fine ie id(mylist[i]) != id(mylist[all others]) what was happening is that during a reproduction function a shallow copies were being made making all offspring (genetic algorithm) have different id(mylist[0..n]), however the actual attributes were referenced for offspring on the same parent(s). Fixed it with a deepcopy and used properties insead of java like get sets.
thanks for all the help, Conor -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list