Analysis of To Know a Fly

Brief Synopsis:

The book, To Know a Fly, is about a scientist and his lifelong fascination with science and the fly. Vincent Dethier is a biologist that loves science and sharing it with the world. The book explains how flies work, shows how science works, and shows a researcher genuinely enjoying his job. He goes into great detail describing his experiments, observations, and discoveries of flies. Dethier chose to study flies for many reasons such as: “the fly is always with us…there are about 50,000 kinds of flies sharing ‘our’ world,” the fly has many amazing and interesting characteristics, and flies are free, easy to come by, and very cheap to use for experimental purposes, plus animals rights activists do not usually harass scientists for experimenting on flies. Of course, Dethier did mention at least one drawback of working with flies, which is that they have an “uncanny knack of escaping.”
Dethier says, “An experiment is a scientist’s way of asking...