Bananas, The Surprising Significance of the Ordinary

I recently had an incredibly stimulating conversation with a curator. At one point, he drew my attention to the strange power that ordinary things can possess. “The displacement of the ordinary” was the theme of his provocation. Perhaps one of these displacements occurred immediately afterward (certainly as a consequence of the conversation that had just ended) when I went to grab a banana to eat and encountered something unexpected.

It may be hard to recall a living being more mundanely present (yet only perceived to the extent that its profoundly ordinary nature is reinforced) than the small fruit flies. These diminutive insects, from the genus Drosophila, have such subtle traits that they escape the uninterested eye. This eye, annoyed, merely acknowledges their presence in the fruit bowl, hovering over the fruits, especially bananas.

What few people know (and understandably so, as the following is niche knowledge that one wouldn’t expect from those who merely want to eat their banana) is that this insignificant creature has had an enormous instrumental importance for the development of genetics. Much of what we know today about heredity, reproduction, chromosomes, and genes stems from elaborate experiments conducted with these tiny flies. Born in glass bottles and induced to mate with other flies, different from them in some identifiable way, scientists meticulously analyzed their offspring in search of the laws governing inherited traits.

It was while pondering this ordinary organism that I almost forgot to bite into my banana.

From The North American Species of Drosophila by Alfred H. Sturtevant, with drawings by Edith M. Wallace., published in 1921 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington (now the Carnegie Institution for Science).