Good question right? If we’re so great and at the top of the foodchain because of how smart we are, why haven’t more animals evolved in the same way? Why are so many of them stupid and seemingly entirely reliant on instinct rather then learning things?

This is the question that Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki from the University of Fribourg tries to answer in his latest round of experiments. I’m afraid that, once again, i’m left with a newspaper article, from NY Times this time around, but they actually cite which journal it’s about to appear in and it seems like a fairly straightforward article, so we’ll run with it.

While i can of course recommend reading the entire article as it is pretty interesting, it is also 2 pages long and if you’re anything like me you have a short attention span (generation Y and all), so i’ll summarize it quickly. What they did was use flies, and performed selective breeding on the ones exhibiting a better ability to learn. The test was to let them taste two jellies of different colors, both with delicious smell to the fly, but one of them spiked with an icky taste. The flies that were later able display that they had learned from their experience and chose the color not containing the crappy taste, were kept and bred. They did this for 15 generations and the results were noticeable, the new breed of flies were much faster to learn then the original breed. Despite them being better learners though, they did not have the upper hand when it came to survival, showing that brawns may win over brains.

It is therefore clear that flies can evolve into smarter creatures fairly fast, but do not do so in nature as it is not beneficial for them. The doctor proposes that they reach an equilibrium of sorts between learning power and instincts. There were some other results in there as well, that suggested that in such simple creatures that the very act of learning could be destructive, and even proposed that this is something that should perhaps be looked into with humans as well (although that all seemed very speculative).

Well i don’t dare to try and explain much more of the article for fear of getting something wrong (i’m a physicist after all! Not a biologist), but that was the gist of it. Like i said, i can recommend reading it for yourself, it’s not very dry and i found it to be easy to grasp (the basics of it anyway).