GROUND-BREAKING PAPER 'EVOLVES' TO BIG-SCREEN STARDOM

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana, according to the old joke.

But Hollywood fruit flies seem to like the research of H. Allen Orr, professor of biology.

That's judging by one scene in last summer's big-screen release Evolution, in which Orr's work made a cameo appearance.

During a classroom scene in the movie, the words-"Read Coyne and Orr paper. Drosophila."-appear on a chalkboard behind the film's lead character, played by David Duchovny of The X-Files.

The assignment is a reference to a ground-breaking paper written by Orr and University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne in 1989 (updated in 1997). The paper analyzes the rate at which new species of fruit flies (Drosophila) branch off from the family tree.

Which, in a comedy about alien species threatening to take over Earth, makes a certain poetic sense.

As for Orr, he was as surprised as the next filmgoer to discover that his paper, "Patterns of Speciation in Drosophila," supplied a little academic seriousness to the sci-fi comedy.

"It's one thing to have a paper recognized by your scientific peers," he says. "It's quite another to have it used by Hollywood as color!"

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