Fruit Flies Revisited

I’m taking a biology class, which I believed would provide me with a wealth of information about the natural world and help me understand urban wildlife. Instead, I’m mired in the chemistry and physics of individual cells—electrons, ions, ATP, ADP, and etc.— which if I were less tired and thus more perceptive, I might be able to translate into acute and stunning observations about the world around me. I did read an interesting article related to biology in today’s New York Times science section about a scientist, Michael Dickinson, who studies fruit flies, those creatures about whom I was so flippant just two posts ago. As it turns out, fruit flies are one of the “most important laboratory animals in the history of biology, often used as a simple model for human genetics or neuroscience.” The article focused more, though, on how different the fruit fly is from us, for example, in its ability to fly and to taste with its wings. Although studied widely, Dickinson says, “we’re still fundamentally ignorant about the many features of its [the fruit fly’s] basic biology…”