Comments on: Fifty-seven Years of Darkness

By: Aaron Novikoff

Aaron Novikoff — Tue, 29 May 2012 05:01:35 +0000

“The researchers found a major difference: when kept in the dark, dark-bred flies laid 373 eggs, plus or minus 20. Ordinary flies laid 293 eggs, plus or minus 73. Somehow, in other words, the dark-bred flies had become better at breeding in the dark.”
Perhaps the lack of light, caused a lack of visual stimuli, leading to less fly lounging as they see no interest to fly too. So the flies just end up running into each other while flying, and thus as the only available stimuli… they smash

“The scientists speculate that flies ordinarily use light to help break down toxins. The dark flies may have evolved a way to do so without the light.”
Or perhaps they have different pathways that are used when needed, such as the pathway for glucose metabolism, gluconeogenesis, or fatty acid oxidation.

Its like once we see a differentiating statistics, we automatically can’t wait to wine and dine Darwin and bring him home to momma

By: Post-Publication Peer Review: What Value Do Usage-Based Metrics Offer? « The Scholarly Kitchen

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:31:40 +0000

[...] half a century, how cool is that? But the results are not terribly significant scientifically. The take home message from the study is that evolution takes a really long time. 57 years meant 1,400 generations of flies, the [...]

By: Bruno Correia

Bruno Correia — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 05:18:00 +0000

Cruel. A total disrespect for life.

By: Casey Bergman

Casey Bergman — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:50:24 +0000

This is not the first time in history that this experiement has been done. Fernandus Payne’s classic 1910 paper in the Biological Bulletin entitled “Forty-nine Generations in the Dark” performed essentially the same experiment in order to test Lamarkian evolution. I find it very odd that the current work does not cite this classic paper especially given that Payne’s project is widely known to be instrumental in T.H. Morgan’s choice to focus on Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism for research in genetics.

See the original paper here: http://www.biolbull.org/content/18/4/188.full.pdf+html

See also a discussion of the role of the original “Dark Fly” experiment on the history of Genetics here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/228840

By: Moscas en la oscuridad: así cambia el genoma tras 57 años y 1.400 generaciones viviendo sin luz | www.Faltariamas.com - www.Faltariamas.es

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:43:52 +0000

[...] mutación de otro que combate las toxinas. Los científicos especulan con que las moscas normales usan la luz para destruir algunas toxinas y las moscas de la oscuridad han evolucionado para destruirlas sin necesidad de [...]

By: Moscas en la oscuridad: así cambia el genoma tras 57 años y 1.400 generaciones viviendo sin luz | El Bioclub

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:03:48 +0000

By: Ignazio Monda

Ignazio Monda — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:15:39 +0000

I found this fascinating that they could and would blind themselves because of their environment, but i wonder do they stay in the cave all the time.

By: Saverio Palumbo

Saverio Palumbo — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:12:32 +0000

This article was very interesting and I learned many things about fly generations that i did not know before, for example A lot of those mutations may not have had any effect on the flies. So the researchers began to sift through the changes for ones that had good evolutionary potential. They found some promising candidates.

By: Prentice

Prentice — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:43:59 +0000

So this is science? This has been going on scince the dawn of government. Treat us like mushrooms, keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit. Sounds very familiar. People have been the flies for quite a long time.

By: Tage

Tage — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:54:35 +0000

I think it would be interesting to find out what those 241 mutations are and how exactly do they give the flies in the dark the advantage.