Brainpower can be a bad thing – at least if you’re a fruit fly. Brainier flies live shorter lives than dumb ones, a finding that backs up the theory that intelligence comes at a cost.
Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and his colleagues taught flies to associate a chemical scent with an unpleasant experience – a violent shaking of their test-tube home – and then bred the best learners. Over time, they created a line of flies that were much better at the task. Three years ago, Kawecki’s team showed that these smarter flies died…
