It May Not Pay to be Smart...If You Are a Fly

It pays be to smart.....doesn't it? Many of us struggled through years of undergraduate and graduate school just to get an upper-hand in the great game of life. But now, a new research article in the journal Evolution suggests that, at least for flies, being smart is going to cost you... in lifespan.

Researchers at the University of Lausanne bred flies that were "smarter" in responding to specific scents than other flies. When they took at look at the lifespan of these flies they realized that the "smart" flies lived about 15% less time than the , well, "not as smart" flies.

Drosophila are often used as model organisms for a variety of genetic studies. This study is important in that it may help shed some light on the "costs" of intelligence. By costs I mean what the organism has to give up in order to develop intelligence, and this is something that we really need to know if we are going to ever figure out how complex intelligence evolved on this planet. However, lets make something clear... these were not smart flies. Flies really aren't very bright, I know, I breed them. They are like fish in a tank... pretty to look at, but not much going on upstairs. So although we can use fruit flies for a variety of purposes, let us not give them credit for being smart.

What I worry about is what will happen when a sound-bite of this information gets out. We already have a problem keeping kids in school - telling them that straight A's will cost them 10 years of their life... well, that would be a mistake. Someone, somewhere, is going to use this information to justify dropping out of school and smoking 2 packs a day.... just watch.