Fruitflies put buzz into Nature vs. Nurture debate
PARIS (AFP) –
If you could put an animal in a time machine and send it back to live in the distant past, would its DNA evolve in reverse, returning to the genetic code of its ancestors?
The intriguing idea has been tested by scientists in Portugal and the United States, using the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as the animal, and a laboratory to recreate the conditions of the past.
The modern-day fruit flies were the distant descendants of an original group that had been harvested in the wild back in 1975.
Over the following decades, 500 generations of flies grew up in different environments.
Different groups of insects were starved, exposed to greater humidity and so on in various research projects, and as a result developed specific charac…
See the full post at Fruitflies put buzz into Nature vs. Nurture debate
