[DouglasKC]

Your experiment is ridiculous. The problem is twofold. Moving the food into water isn't going to turn the flies into fish. What it's far more likely to do is force the flies to go after a different source of food. Those who depend on the food you've moved will simply die out slowly (you'd best be moving the food over a period of a few million years with no other changes to the environment or all the flies will simply die) while those who have an alternate source of food will simply ignore the food moved under the water.

Apparently I didn't share my vision enough. In my experiment, the flies are contained in a large tank. The tank has plenty of water, air, food and whatever else is needed to make a wonderful fruitfly habitat. Also contained in the tank is water. The food is slowly moved into the water, over generations of fruit flies. Each step along the way would require the fruit fly to evolve a little more.

For example, food at the surface of the water would kill off the fruitflies who were stupid enough to land on the water. If the food were just below the surface, then fruitflies who could dunk their little fruit fly heads in the water and eat would have the advanatage.

Theoretically, after thousands of generations of fruit files, and if evolution of species is true, then eventually the fittest fruit flies will have evolved to be able to swim to the bottom of the tank and get the food.

It would be a graudual process for sure, but it should be easily demonstrated. I wonder if evolutionists have tried it yet. If not, why?

[puroresu]

Unless you can conduct this experiment over millions of years, it won't work. In fact, it won't work even if you do conduct it over millions of years. But that's evolution's dirty little secret! :-)

[stremba]

It could also cause the fruit flies to become extinct. There is no guarantee that the species will evolve the necessary variation.

[NJ_gent]

"In my experiment, the flies are contained in a large tank. The tank has plenty of water, air, food and whatever else is needed to make a wonderful fruitfly habitat."

You don't want a wonderful fruitfly habitat; you want one that encourages the traits you want and discourages (through natural selection) the traits you do not want. That environment must shift gradually over time to continue favoring those with the particular traits which will lead toward different creatures that become successively less like fruitflies and more like the creature you want. In all actuality, with something so limited, you'd more likely end up with something like an amphibian. I suppose if land-dwelling predators were gradually introduced, natural selection would ensure that those staying the longest in the water survived, which eventually could lead more toward fish-like or whale-like creatures. All this is incredibly simplistic. There's not just one particular trait you'd have to encourage - you'd have to encourage the right traits at the right times while discouraging the wrong traits and the right times.

"For example, food at the surface of the water would kill off the fruitflies who were stupid enough to land on the water. If the food were just below the surface, then fruitflies who could dunk their little fruit fly heads in the water and eat would have the advanatage."

Something tells me your fruitfly experiment would end with extinction of the little beasties. Mother nature doesn't target one trait in very specific ways. In fact, she generally targets a vast array with varying degrees of importance attached.

"Theoretically, after thousands of generations of fruit files, and if evolution of species is true, then eventually the fittest fruit flies will have evolved to be able to swim to the bottom of the tank and get the food."

In a perfectly-designed experiment? Possibly - though they'd be nothing like fruitflies any longer. Setting up something like this, including a huge team of top-of-the-line professionals, massively complex computer simulations to predict proper environmental conditions for optimal speed of evolution, round-the-clock monitoring and care for the environment, etc, then letting it run for the hundreds of years it'd likely require would probably cost in the tens of billions, if not the tens of trillions. Why hasn't someone designed an experiment like this? Because no one's offering a multi-trillion dollar contract to do so.

[NeuronExMachina]

Theoretically, after thousands of generations of fruit files, and if evolution of species is true, then eventually the fittest fruit flies will have evolved to be able to swim to the bottom of the tank and get the food.

It would be a graudual process for sure, but it should be easily demonstrated. I wonder if evolutionists have tried it yet. If not, why?

This is somewhat different from the experiment you tried, but here's an interesting published abstract from here:

Experimental evolution of learning ability in fruit flies
Frederic Mery * and Tadeusz J. Kawecki (2002)

The presence of genetic variation for learning ability in animals opens the way for experiments asking how and under what ecological circumstances improved learning ability should evolve. Here we report experimental evolution of learning ability in Drosophila melanogaster. We exposed experimental populations for 51 generations to conditions that we expected to favor associative learning with regard to oviposition substrate choice. Flies that learned to associate a chemical cue (quinine) with a particular substrate, and still avoided this substrate several hours after the cue had been removed, were expected to contribute more alleles to the next generation. From about generation 15 on, the experimental populations showed marked ability to avoid oviposition substrates that several hours earlier had contained the chemical cue. The improved response to conditioning was also expressed when the flies were faced with a choice of novel media. We demonstrate that these behavioral changes are caused by the evolution of both a higher learning rate and a better memory.