In a way, fruit flies are just like us. They have eyes, legs, nervous systems, and they love fruit. Unlike us, however, they only have a few thousand neurons in their brains, which means scientists can map of just all the cells but all the connections between them — producing for the first time a complete digital “connectome” of a living creature that is, when you think about it, basically a human.
Perhaps I overstate our similarities to fruit flies, commonly called by their scientific name, Drosophila (melanogaster, though that part isn’t usually necessary), but there’s a reason we use them in lots of biological experiments. You may not think you’re much like one of these creatures, but you’re definitely more like a fruit fly than you are like a bacterium or dinoflagellate. Understanding even a relatively simple animal like drosophila teaches us a lot about a...
