does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from
so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once
Is the goal to see if being able to observe multiple options simultaneously effects the watching flies' choices?
hello, thank you for asking, I was basically sitting over here vibrating hoping for the opportunity to infodump more
so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people's decisions and mimicking them.
in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner
the simplest version of the fly sex panopticon is basically just a 2-chamber tube where scientists can orchestrate sex shows for fruit flies.
("watch a demonstration" is scientist code for watch anorthern pair of fruit flies have sex)
you can very quickly instill a preference: cover male fruit flies with pink or green fluorescent powder, and then let a female fly observe another female fly having sex with a pink male. the observer will conclude that pink is extremely sexy and be much more likely to select a hot pink male herself. by switching the colors and the learned preference to green, you can demonstrate that this is indeed learned behavior, and not some kind of pre-existing genetic preference.
the 6-way "sexagon" was invented for this paper to test how seeing different ratios of pink vs. green males being chosen would affect the development of preference.
the cool thing about this graph is it shows it didn't matter if there were only slightly more of the the females picking pink or green males, the observer would still develop a preference for whatever the majority were choosing.
the whole paper is very cool, and absolutely worth a read:
it argues (and supports experimentally) that since preferences can be learned and passed on, fruit flies have an actual culture that can vary among populations and be transmitted to youngsters across generations.
this is super cool, because most studies proposing or examining the existence of culture in animals have been focused on higher level stuff like monkeys. if something as simple as a fruit fly can have a culture, this suggests that animal culture could have had huge effects on evolution from the ground up.
so yes, animal culture! fruit fly culture! very cool
but also an excellent evolutionary argument for voyeurism
I think I've learnt something about our culture that always had me confused.
So I have extrapolated from what @curlicuecal said to our own culture.
The original comments are -
"
so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people's decisions and mimicking them.
in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner"
So does this mean, that in our culture, the people we're shown in adverts, in TV series, in films, that are called handsome or pretty, is mimicked by people who can't / won't do the work to find out their own preferences?
My partner was obsessed with the fact he's not 6' tall and 'traditionally' handsome and I didn't get why. I have been force fed the image of a tall man with particular features and told he is attractive and sexy and from that I should then select a partner to match. Which would naturally preclude him.
Wow. That explains why people who look like the ones in adverts etc are so popular and get partners so easily, we've been shown / taught that they're sexy, so we copy that ourselves.
Holy shit if I've understood this right. It does make sense why the beauty industry works how it does, as it must know that it's creating the short cut to what is considered sexy and attractive and desirable to a lot of people.
And yeah, voyeurism is part of this with half naked people or mimicking intimacy (particularly in perfume adverts for some reason).
Thank you fruit flies and your lack of inhibitions to shag in full view of others and probably even encourage it.
yes, absolutely! and this applies much more broadly--
a thing to remember about humans is that we store most of our knowledge in other people. our society and the systems and technology around us are WAY too complicated for any one person to understand everything. we're specialists, and we need other people to fill in the gaps with summaries and analyses that we can apply without personally digging in.
I'd speculate this is part of the reason we feel so personally invested in other people in our communities having the same opinions and morals and priorities as us-- if we need to use other people to help us make decisions and understand the world, we want them to be Like Us.
