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OK. There seems to be some confusion about what it means to study fruit flies.
Very few people study fruit flies because they are interested in fruit flies. These researchers in particular seem to be interested in Autism. Why study fruit flies to learn about Autism?
That's how science works. It's very rare that you study directly study the phenomenon you are interested in. I'm interested in how people "read between the lines." That's hard to study directly, so I pick simpler questions that I can study that will help move us in the direction of the questions I really care about.
Fruit flies are enormously useful animals to study because they breed quickly, because their genome is very well understood, and because there are a lot of developed tools for studying them.
Mendel discovered the properties of genetics by studying pea plants. Darwin developed the theory of evolution by studying birds. You can imagine Palin now: Pea plants! At a monastery! Birds at a tropical island! What waste!
Please try my web-based experiments