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?
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