Fruit Flies and Free Will

Free will. It's one of those nagging issues that's been around for a long time and which most of us do our best to ignore, although we English types tend to fret about it whenever we teach Oedipus Rex.

Google the term Free Will and you will generate a great many links to philosophical ruminations on the topic. (You'll also get a lot of hits for free software which will enable you to produce your own last will and testament, but that's another issue entirely.) Virtually every philosopher worth his or her salt has wrestled with the problem.

It was inevitable that scientists would weigh in on such a ripe topic. Last May neurobiologists at the Free University of Berlin in Germany published an article in Plos one entitled "Order in Spontaneous Behavior", which took a look at the issue not from the perspective of a Greek king and his mother but from the perspective of the fruit fly.

The researchers glued fruit flies to torque meters and put them in a white environment and then recorded where they tried to go. The result? Well, according to "Order in Spontaneous Behavior"

Instead of random noise, we find a fractal order (resembling Lévy flights) in the temporal structure of spontaneous flight maneuvers in tethered Drosophila fruit flies. Lévy-like probabilistic behavior patterns are evolutionarily conserved, suggesting a general neural mechanism underlying spontaneous behavior.

This set off a spate of somewhat more readable articles on the original research. It also led Scott Adams in The Dilbert Blog to observe that a more accurate title of the paper would be “Study Shows Fruit Flies Look Around Even When There’s Not Much to Look At.”

Links:

• Free Will -- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Free Will -- The Catholic Encyclopedia
  
• Study hints that fruit flies have free will-- MSNBC
• Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will?-- (complete with photos and diagrams)
• Free Will in Fruit Flies -- The Dilbert Blog
• Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices -- Reuters