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Link Banana

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Quick Learners Die Sooner #

April 28th, 2008 | In Worth Knowing 

Of course there are 100 reasons to disregard the meaning of a study that involves fruit flies, but this left me a tad disheartened:

After repeating the experiment for 30 generations, the offspring of the learned flies were compared with normal flies. The researchers report in a forthcoming edition of Evolution that although learning ability could be bred into a population of fruit flies, it shortened their lives by 15%. When the researchers compared their learned flies to colonies selectively bred to live long lives, they found even greater differences. Whereas learned flies had reduced life spans, the long-lived flies learned less well than even average flies.

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Tags: fruit flies, intelligence, learning, science, the economist

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