What a great piece for helping make sense of the fruit fly sex experiments! I hope you'll post more on biological studies. Those are way outside my training and really important to understand.

Speaking of understanding, can you help me understand how directly conclusions based on fruit flies can be applied to humans? Your point C highlights how important it is to take culture into account, and I totally agree, but on a purely biological basis, if culture were not an issue, are humans enough like fruit flies that if something were true for fruit flies we could be pretty confident it would also be true for humans?

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth