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Thursday, November 10, 2005
Gentlemen! Behold! The Gay Fruitfly!
This week in Nature we have some interesting articles, worthy of Dr. Weird.
 From Nature the physiology of Gay fruitflies based on a recent Cell paper in which the authors generated gay and lesbian flies (no shit). The news article in nature is here. Briefly: The sexual behaviour of insects has been tweaked before by altering a gene called fruitless. Male fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster) that have mutations in this gene often fail to make a protein called Fru. These flies do not engage in the normal mating ritual of tapping and tilting movements that attract females. If male flies have a milder mutation in the fruitless gene, resulting in production of small amounts Fru protein, they court male and female flies alike. On the flipside, females engineered to carry the male-specific fruitless gene suddenly begin wooing other females with the tapping and tilting routine. Although these behavioural switches intrigued researchers, any anatomical difference in the flies remained elusive. ... The Japanese team show that homosexual females designed to produce the Fru protein develop an intact nerve-cell cluster. And males with mutations in the fruitless gene lack these nerve cells. The results of the study, which appear in Nature, suggest that the presence of this network in the insects' brains determines which partners they woo. |
2 Comments:
How long until the "clamp your hands over your ears and scream 'la la la la la' at the top of your lungs" crowd fully ignores this one?
It would be so easy to solve this problem once and for all if only humans were a tractable genetic model.
2:37 PM, November 10, 2005
The answer is, forever.
I don't think too much can be read into a fruitfly article though. After all, if you read the paper you see the mating behavior is induced almost entirely by exposure to pheromones from the opposite sex. The flies are very simple, they're not checking out the other fly's package, they just have a circuit in their brain that says, "mate with that smell."
Also, you are forgetting the first lesson of giving up. Your opponents are not rational, thinking intellectuals that incorporate scientific facts and findings into their worldview. A paper could get published showing the exact polygenic makeup that defines the human homosexual phenotype and the right-wingers will still say God hates fags, and it's a sin, blah blah blah. Give up.
4:26 PM, November 10, 2005
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