Too Smart for Your Own Good?

Any body ever accuse you of being too smart for your own good?

Me neither, but it seems that you can be, at least if you are a fruit fly.

In a series of experiments, scientists selected fruit flies for their ability to learn to recognize an undesireable food source by repeatedly breeding the best learners. The fruit flies became good at this kind of learning after a few generations.

It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked jellies. The fast-learning strain of flies needs less than an hour.

It seems that their learning extracted a cost, though:

But the flies pay a price for fast learning. Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues pitted smart fly larvae against a different strain of flies, mixing the insects and giving them a meager supply of yeast to see who would survive. The scientists then ran the same experiment, but with the ordinary relatives of the smart flies competing against the new strain. About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did.

The trouble with this experiment for me is that they initially selected the flies for just the ability to learn one thing. It would hardly be strange if they acquired that ability at some other genetic cost - otherwise why wouldn't the wild type have already acquired that trait. The analogous experiment with humans might select humans for, say, ability to learn trigonometry. After 15 generations or so of this, would anyone be surprised if it turned out that the math geeks couldn't compete with wild type humans in the jungle?

An interesting experiment, but as it stands, it hardly is evidence for the authors point.

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