Dumb Flies Live Longer Than Clever Ones

Catchy title huh? Well this is from the Discovery Channel website. If you’re a fly, it doesn’t pay to be smart, according to some new research done by a Swiss university. Scientists Tadeusz Kawecki and Joep Burger discovered that there was a “negative correlation between an improvement in a fly’s mental capacity and its longevity”. Hmmm, strange? This is how the experiment went. Half of the flies were left in their natural state while the other half was confisitoned using Pavlov’s methods. This conditioning boosted the their intelligence. Over 30 to 40 generations, it was clear that these smarter flies remembered things for longer and learned better. I do however wonder how they know these flies were just plain smarter? Anyway, the flies that were left in the natural state lived about 80-85 days, compared to the normal ones that lived only about 50-60 days. The scientists think that the intelligent flies died earlier because increased neural activity weakened the fly’s other systems. Well, ignorance is a bliss.

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