Fruit Fly Experiment Essay

Discussion: Referring to the hypothesis we predicted in the beginning of this experiment that under ideal conditions, we hypothesized that the results will eventually follow the Hardy-Weinberg expectations, which means the genotypes frequencies of the Drosophila melanogaster would remain constant; Therefore, no evolution had happened to the flies under the ideal conditions. After the chi-squared values were found in each week (table 1), in the third generation where the chi-squared was found to be 0.32 which most likely fall between the two values of 0.148 and 0.455. These two values correspond to a probability values of 0.70 and 0.50, and these two values lay to the left of the p- value of 0.05, which means the null hypothesis presented
in this experiment the number of ebony flies were double the number of wild type flies, but they were put in a similar condition to our experiment (Salata, et al., 2002). The observed gene frequency of the two types of flies very close to the expected gene frequency over the 12 weeks’ period. The number of ebony type flies experienced a gradual decrease, but this was expected from the formula because heterozygous flies were yield by the mating of the homozygous wild type with a homozygous recessive type flies. The results of this experiment also showed no evolution (Salata, et al., 2002). In future study of Drosophila melanogaster, I suggest that the study is carried over longer time, and larger number of flies, to give a more precise and accurate results. Another thing I suggest is providing special equipment for this experiment such as special brushes to move the flies not the paint brushes, because these brushes might kill the flies with lack of experience and this happened with us, and the flies got stuck between the paint brush bristles and it was hard to get them out without killing