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 what some accepted as bedrock may actually be quicksand. It is possible that Bateman's paper should never have been published."
The UCLA study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The original experiment on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was performed long before molecular evidence from DNA was available. Bateman's rather crude method of figuring out which males mated with which females based on the inherited mutations of their offspring had what DeRose's release calls a "fatal flaw."
