Free Will and Fruit Flies

One to set the philosophers debating (via):

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 and evolution of free will in humans...

For centuries, the question of whether or not humans possess free will — and thus control their own actions — has been a source of hot debate.

"Free will is essentially an oxymoron — we would not consider it 'will' if it were completely random and we would not consider it 'free' if it were entirely determined," Brembs said. In other words, nobody would ascribe responsibility to one's actions if they were entirely the result of random coincidence. On the other hand, if one's actions were completely determined by outside factors such that no alternative existed, no one would hold that person responsible for them.

"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground" between randomness and determinism "that is currently not well understood or characterized," said mathematical biologist George Sugihara at the University of California at San Diego...

Brembs and his colleagues reasoned that if fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) were simply reactive robots entirely determined by their environment, in completely featureless rooms they should move completely randomly. To investigate this idea, the international team of researchers glued the insects to small copper hooks in completely uniform white surroundings, a kind of visual sensory deprivation tank. These flies could still beat their wings and attempt to turn.

A plethora of increasingly sophisticated computer analyses revealed that the way the flies turned back and forth over time was far from random. Instead, there appeared to be "a function in the fly brain which evolved to generate spontaneous variations in the behavior," Sugihara said.

Specifically, their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy's distribution, commonly found in nature. Flies use this procedure to find meals, as do albatrosses, monkeys and deer. Scientists have found similar patterns in the flow of e-mails, letters and money, and in the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Brembs said.

These strategies in flies appear to arise spontaneously and do not result from outside cues, according to findings detailed in Wednesday's issue of the journal PLoS ONE. This makes their behavior seem to lie somewhere between completely random and purely determined, "and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will," Sugihara added. "This function appears to be common to many other animals."

This is all very interesting, and it's true that they aren't claiming that they've demonstrated free will in fruit flies, as might seem to be the case if you read the article's headline, but somehow all this talk of complexity of behaviour misses the point, doesn't it? I'd have thought that a lack of randomness was in fact a pretty good definition of life. Specks of dust move about randomly: organisms show a purpose. And this is how the fruit flies acted in this experiment - with a purpose. If they reacted entirely in response to outside influences, then they wouldn't be living creatures.

Complexity of behaviour and free will do clearly relate to each other in some way, but in the end it surely comes down to a decision on our parts as to what level of behaviour we want to describe as showing the exercise of free will. It's a philosophical argument. Because of its clear relevance to the question of moral responsibility, many would say that only humans have free will, though it's a point that's probably less accepted now than it used to be. Others would argue that animals - cats, dogs - surely have free will. But as you move down the level of intelligence, the question of free will becomes more and more....not wrong, just inappropriate. When you get down to the level of insects, it's simply not a debate worth having. Do fruit flies have free will? It's not a question that makes sense.

Whatever, I'm not clear how science helps here, or what this experiment contributes to the debate. There's never going to be a scientific experiment that decides whether or not a particular organism has free will: it's not that kind of problem. But then I've never heard of Levy's distribution, so what do I know?

Comments

[dearieme]

"I've never heard of Levy's distribution": nor me. But the way that naming works in Science means that you can be fairly confident that the first person to observe it wasn't Levy.

[DaninVan]

Levi's distribution was zip.
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/judaism/f/12Tribes.htm

[Matt Munro]

Er is this new ? Skinner first made the distinction between elicitited behaviours (those in response to stimuli) and emitted behaviours (occur naturally) in his infamous boxes. The label "emitted" was seen as something of a cop out as the S:R model doesn't really explain why an animal would press a lever the first time.
I've never heard of Leveys distribution either, but it's unlikley that insects behaviours are truly random as this would be disadvantagous in terms of survival e.g spiders webs all have a common structure, desite being different sizes and shapes, this has presumably evolved as being the structure most likely to trap food, and the most likley explanation is a gentic program which gives the spider a behavioral template for web building, which it can adapt to its' environment, I'm not sure you could call this free will though, it's more likely to be a form of developmental plasticity.

You're righ that the question of free will doesn't make sense when appliedf to a fruit fly, that's because free will is an entirely social construction, so even if it exists, and I'm not convinced, it cannot be applied to animals.

[dearieme]

Lest we forget. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

[Dom]

"...the S:R model doesn't really explain why an animal would press a lever the first time."

Very OT here. But Skinner noted that all the rats in his boxes had to be "primed" (his word) to press the lever the first time. That was why he switched to Pigeons. Pecking for a pigeon didn't need to be primed the way pressing did for a rat.

The question "where does behavior come from" didn't interest him, just like "how did life begin" doesn't interest evolutionists. Given that animals emit behaviors, why does some behavior become more likely, others less likely? That was the question for behaviorists.