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Original "Dark Fly" paper published over 100 years ago not cited here

Posted by caseybergman on 19 Mar 2012 at 16:38 GMT

I find it very odd that this work does not cite Fernandus Payne's classic 1910 paper in the Biological Bulletin entitled "Forty-nine Generations in the Dark" which performed essentially the same experiment in order to test Lamarkian evolution, especially given that this project is widely known to be instrumental in T.H. Morgan's choice to focus on Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism for research in genetics.

See the original paper here: http://www.biolbull.org/c...

See also a discussion of the role of the original "Dark Fly" experiment on the history of Genetics here: http://www.jstor.org/stab...

No competing interests declared.

RE: Original "Dark Fly" paper published over 100 years ago not cited here

naoyukifuse replied to caseybergman on 08 May 2012 at 11:44 GMT

Thank you for your comment. We did not cite the historical references, but Mori, who started to rear Dark-fly, discussed about the Payne’s works in his paper (see Mori, 1986). Although these previous studies mainly focus on the traits selected in dark conditions, we focus on the genome alterations involved in the adaptation. Therefore, we mainly discussed about molecular studies of the naturally and laboratory evolved organisms. I also note that our Dark-fly has been reared for 1400 generations longer than the Payne’s fly. I appreciate you to remind us the position of our work on the history of Drosophila research.
Naoyuki Fuse

No competing interests declared.