Blog 20 : Time, Love and Memory

Assignment: Summarize three key ideas you learned from Beak of the Finch or Time, Love, Memory. Be explicit about how it relates to the curriculum.




In Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner i learned about many scientists and their quest to understanding behavior and molecular genetics.  The first key idea from this book was when the scientist Morgan and his raiders first discovered gene mapping.  It had been more that 50 years since the discovery of genes ( Gregory Mendel with his peas/flowers) and Morgan decided to find gene traits in flies.  Morgan and his students concluded with their experiment of fruit flies that these flies had 1% or one map unit of white eyes and yellow bodies.  This helped me understand more of Mendel's work about offsprings, traits, phenotypes and everything else related to genes.  Another major concept is the actual experiments that make up the title" Time, Love, Memory".  In the time fly experiment, some flies can tell time even if they are in a closed room with no light.  This explained why some flies are not affected by seeing the light (signifying the starting of the day) or the darkness(time to go to sleep).  In "First Love" the chapter talks about the different drosophila species and how they preform sex with female fruit flies. Some male fruit flies sadly do not have enough "potential" to last a whole ritual of mating because they are too weak or are born with abnormalities.  This is important because this is similar in humans.  Some male humans can not hold an erection long enough in order to complete reproduction with a female .  Therefore by studying these fruit flies, scientists can discover how to prevent this from happening to any man and the causes of these sex situations.  The last concept is the Memory fly.  There are flies that can learn a concept easily while others do not exemplify a sign of knowledge( referred to as dunce flies).  A student of scientist Chipp Quinn, discovered that not all flies are dunce, some just forget their information fast.  Tim Tully designed a teaching machine which was very silent and would not distract flies in any way.  After his experiment with his new machine and the memory flies, he concluded that the flies who he had taken a new test after another without no break period failed their test because they just crammed everything and did not actually learn.  They only had short term memory.  On the other hand, the fruit flies that had taken test but with break periods did learn their lessons much faster that the crammers and as a result they could still remember them for more than a week.  "Time, Love and Memory" is a great book to read to learn more of the origins of behavior and how it has lead to the study of molecular genetics.