The so-called Harvard Law of Animal Behavior states that
Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases.
Björn Brembs and colleagues (the author of the study published by Plos One) surmise that there exists a “spontaneity generator” in the flies’ brains that does not depend on external information in a determinate way… Such a neural circuit could, the researchers say, be a kind of precursor to the mental wiring of humans that enables us to ignore environmentally conditioned responses and “make up our own minds”…
Funny. It’s an epistemological commonplace that all we can understand is rules. Obviously we cannot understand free will. Rationally we can’t. If we relax the rules, we open the door to randomness, and randomness has as little to do with will as rules have to do with freedom. A rule-governed free-will generator is an oxymoron. Which presumably is why Nature’s Philipp Ball concludes
that ‘free will’ is (like ‘life’ and ‘love’) one of those culturally useful notions that become meaningless when we try to make them ’scientific’… Free will is a concept for poets and novelists, and, if it keeps them happy, for philosophers and moralists. In science and politics, it deserves no place.
Tant pis for science! As for keeping it out of politics, that I think is criminal.
| Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will? Scientists Measure Spontaneity In … Medical News Today (press release), UK - 16 May 2007 Free will and true spontaneity exist … in fruit flies. This is what scientists report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access … |
| Flies choose to irritate Daily Telegraph, Australia - 16 May 2007 If confirmed, the discovery could overturn basic assumptions about differences between humans and animals: the blowie or wasp that will not leave you alone … |
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Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will? Science Daily (press release) - 16 May 2007 Science Daily — Free will and true spontaneity exist … in fruit flies. This is what scientists report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, … |
| Fruit flies also have free wills NewKerala.com, India - 16 May 2007 Washington, May 16 : A new study has found that fruit fly - drosophila melanogaster - is not just a ‘complex robot’ as previously thought, but an insect … |
| Flies ‘have free will’ Channel 4 News, UK - 16 May 2007 If confirmed, the discovery could overturn basic assumptions about the difference between humans and animals. Understanding the mechanisms involved may also … |
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Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices Scientific American - 15 May 2007 By Julie Steenhuysen. CHICAGO (Reuters) - A tiny fruit fly — without any input from the outside world — will spontaneously change directions, … |
| Do flies have free will? Nature.com (subscription), UK - 15 May 2007 Gluing a fly’s head to a wire and watching it trying to fly sounds more like the sort of experiment a naughty schoolboy would conduct than one that turns … |
| Fruit flies display rudimentary free will New Scientist (subscription), UK - 15 May 2007 Fruit flies have free will. Even when deprived of any sensory input to react to, the zigs and zags of their flight reveal an intrinsic, non-random - yet … |
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Study hints that fruit flies have free will MSNBC - 15 May 2007 By Charles Q. Choi. A spark of free will may exist in even the tiny brain of the humble fruit fly, based on new findings that could shed light on the nature … |
| More to a fly than meets the eye Metro, UK - 15 May 2007 Next time that fly is buzzing around your head, don’t think it’s just flying about at random to annoy you. In fact it knows exactly where it is going and … |
