Sex & the Single Fruit Fly: Study Debunked An iconic study
published in 1948 purported to show that the male fruit fly has
a wandering eye while the females of the species are selective
and faithful. That assumption has been the foundation of
evolutionary biology for decades. Now, however, scientists at
the University of California, Los Angeles, have replicated the
research and found it to be seriously unsound. In a release from
the university, Kim DeRose wrote: "English geneticist Angus John
Bateman published a study showing that male fruit flies gain an
evolutionary advantage from having multiple mates, while their
female counterparts do not." DeRose went on to quote Patricia
Adair Gowaty, a distinguished professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology at UCLA, as saying "Bateman's 1948 study is
the most-cited experimental paper in sexual selection today
because of its conclusions about how the number of mates
influences fitness in males and females . . . Our team repeated
Bateman's experiment and found that