Free Will in Fruit Flies

Many people forwarded me a link to this story titled “Study Hints that Fruit Flies Have Free Will.” It gave me a good laugh.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18684016/?GT1=9951

My favorite part is where the scientist speculates that if free will exists, it is in the middle ground between randomness and determinism.

Huh?

That sounds a lot like halfway between orange and three. You can’t pick any two things and speculate that there’s something sensible in the middle. This is your first clue that there’s some fuzzy thinking going on here.

So the researchers glued a fruit fly to a hook in a totally white environment to see if he reacted randomly, since there were no environmental cues to guide him. The fly acted non-randomly. This non-random action is labeled “spontaneous” by the researchers who then conclude they’ve made some sort of headway toward understanding free will in humans.

Um. . . What happened to determinism?

The most likely explanation for the test results is that fruit fly behavior is predetermined, just like the rest of the universe, but too complicated to predict, even when you constrain a few variables. The test ruled out randomness, but it never addressed determinism. And determinism is where the smart money is, say Spinoza and Einstein, for example.

According to many of the readers of this blog, free will is somehow connected to randomness. So for you folks, the fruit fly test actually struck a blow to the possibility of free will by showing that fruit flies don’t appear to have random behavior.

I guess the headline about the existence of free will seemed better than their first choice: “Study Shows Fruit Flies Look Around Even When There’s Not Much to Look At.”

Comments

[Fltrap]

I only stumbled on this blog recently and it has become a staple of my morning ritual. Blog's like today's are exactly why. I almost fell off the chair laughing. My recent hobby has been studying the quantum physics and chaos theory. In my (admittedly amateur) reading, the more you study the behavior of extremely small particles of matter the less you come to believe in randomness. It starts to dawn on you that the universe is exactly a VERY ordered and structured place. This can only make you ponder on determinism and the nature of God. The perceived randomness, seems to me, to be only our own inability to comprehend the vastness of it all, there is always a "third" variable we are too dumb to see. The river flows and we are drifting along on it either as clueless driftwood, or we are engaged in the most awesome whitewater rafting and rapid shooting adventure of them all.

[latsot]

"You can listen to a programme in which a "Scientist" talks about how there's no such thing as species."

Well....'species' is an artificial concept, invented by us. It often useful, but it has no intrinsic meaning of its own. The boundaries between species are decided by humans using an arbitrary measure - often (but not always) whether or not two individuals can successfully reproduce - but it is important to remember that *we* decided on these criteria.

Think about how evolution happens: it is gradual. No organism has offspring sufficiently different to itself that it could be considered a different species. However, over time, we end up with a very different individual that *could* be considered a different species.

Consider the common ancestor of humans and chimps, for example. An individual had two offspring, both of which were very similar to itself, but one of which happened to be on the lineage that evolved into humans and one on the lineage that evolved into chimps. If you could see every animal in these chains, you would not be able to find a discontinuity where one child was sufficiently different from its parent to be considered by any reasonably criteria a new species.

All we can see is the very end of these chains - modern humans and modern chimps, for example - plus a few snapshots along the way from fossils. We are clearly quite different to chimps and it is easy to say we are different species. The same is true of early hominid and chimp fossils. When we think of the chains of individuals going back to the common ancestor, it is a lot more difficult to claim that there is any kind of 'natural' boundary between species.

In summary: it is a useful concept, but a definition rather than a description.

[Stephen Ware]

The notion that 'free will' is random is no more comforting than the idea that it doesn't exist... for me at least. If it is random, or tied to randomness, it almost seems worse.

I think the main problem is that we have a hard time defining 'free' in this sense. What motivates the choices? If it's some set of morals or ethics, then it's more like determinism. If its randomness or somehow related to randomness, you lose the notion of agenthood.

[Adam]

I never did enjoy Jackson Pollock's work.

[latsot]

"The more important reason why I adhere to free will, is the apparent concequences of doing otherwise."

This is a rather silly argument. Something isn't any less true just because you don't like the consequences. Also, think about what you are saying: if you thought you didn't have free will, you would CHOOSE to sit around doing nothing? How would you make that choice without free will?

If you improve yourself, then does the fact that you didn't have any say in the matter make you any less improved? I don't believe in free will, but I am still capable of feeling a sense of achievement and I still tend to chalk up my successes to 'me'. I still strive to do better. This is not a contradiction.

[latsot]

"Only a few things prevent me from jumping on the determinism bandwagon. One such thing is the "illusion" of free will. This one piece of evidence is much like a single "what's going on over there?" in an otherwise clear explanation. Obviously, this could just be a survival instinct or something I've learned over the years, but it is out of sync with the rest of the data."

Haven't you noticed how easily and intuitively we ascribe free will to other people, other animals and even to objects? Even babies seem to do this: experiments have been carried out with babies watching a screen with a dot apparently chasing another dot around the place. When the chasing dot suddenly starts behaving differently, the babies appeared to show surprise.

How many times have you felt that your car or your computer was deliberately trying to thwart you? I'm not suggesting anyone really believes that the car or the computer or even the dots have free will, but that it is very natural for humans to project the illusion of free will onto things. It is easy to come up with evolutionary explanations for this.

The point is that we often have what is presumably an illusion that other things have free will. We have notoriously faulty pattern recognition under some circumstances (which also has an evolutionary explanation) and see apparent decision-making where it is not really happening. Since we project this illusion of free will onto other things so readily and intuitively, why not onto ourselves?

[Kevin Kunreuther]

Who ponied up the dough for those geniuses? Is it too late to demand a refund?

[latsot]

"Neither [Spinoza nor Einstein] were atheists, either."

Not that it is particularly on topic, but Einstein certainly was an atheist and stated this perfectly clearly many times ("I do not believe in a personal god", etc.)

He used the word "god" occasionally, but later made it clear that he was referring metaphorically to a sense of wonder about the universe rather than to any supernatural being.

[Ludwig]

Isn't this experiment a little like the researcher, 10+ years ago, that concluded that tortises thermoregulate because he measured different body temperatures among members of an outdoor group, all in the same weather conditions? I don't remember who the players were, but another researcher read the paper and published a rebuttal paper which concluded that discarded beer cans thermoregulate, based on the same method and sample size! Does anybody remember the details?

[Arby]

If we are to take this German free-will experiment to the next level imagine trying it on humans. They may have a hard time finding subjects that will agree to have their head super-glued to a copper hook and put in a white box/room trying to move about.

We could use lawyers for this but they would skew the results and statistics, ask too many dumb questions and delay the process by suing the researchers. Politicians would be a little better, but not much as many of them were lawyers at one time, but how truthful would they be as politicians will say anything they think the polls reveal.

It would take someone already whacked out on drugs to go along with this process and they wouldn’t even remember that they did it or were even there. I would be really ticked off if I was German citizen and they were using my tax dollars fund this University’s weird studies.

[Arby]

If we are to take this German free-will experiment to the next level imagine trying it on humans. They may have a hard time finding subjects that will agree to have their head super-glued to a copper hook and put in a white box/room trying to move about.

We could use lawyers for this but they would skew the results and statistics, ask too many dumb questions and delay the process by suing the researchers. Politicians would be a little better, but not much as many of them were lawyers at one time, but how truthful would they be as politicians will say anything they think the polls reveal.

It would take someone already whacked out on drugs to go along with this process and they wouldn’t even remember that they did it or were even there. I would be really ticked off if I was German citizen and they were using my tax dollars fund this University’s weird studies.

[redblue]

All that the experiment showed is that fruit flies, in the absence of external cues, show non-random yet unpredictable-in-a-chaotic kind of manner. The term "chaotic" comes from Chaos Theory where such processes are deterministic, but take massive amount of resources to compute, like fractals.
Fuzzy thinking indeed. If anything, the experiment demonstrated that fruit flies have NO free will.

[Go Melinda!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]

yo, both free will and determinism exist simultaneously

[Okgenuine]

If more than half of your week isn't dominated by anybody else or illnesses, isn't that freedom and freewill? If somebody has that, and they permanently injure somebody else, doesn't that mean they're evil? When I saw Saddam with the Koran at his hanging, which is the same as having the bible or a buddhist book etc., I decided right there that evil people's agenda is to look good no matter what right to the bitter end. Life is just a game to them no matter what and responsible people are the bitter enemy. Scary.

[chase]

I have free will. I chose to waste my time typing this as opposed to the opposite action of not typing. My "conditions" didn't make me do it. Look at almost any psychological studies on twins (either fraternal or paternal) and it's unmistakeably clear that one's surroundings alone do not CAUSE them to do one thing or another.

At the same time, it seems to me quite plausible that God knows what I'm going to do, but this does not imply the strict deterministic CAUSAL effect we often attribute to this knowledge. If I put a dog treat on the floor, I know my dog will eat it immediately, but that doesn't mean I'm making him eat it, and it doesn't mean he's not making a choice to eat it. Determinism as a theory doesn't absolve people from their actions and decisions. If it did, we would have no basis for a legal system and no moral compass. www.str.org (stand to reason) is a pretty good site that I know has recently addressed the "do animals have a soul" debate, which is similar.

[Roni]

[Do you believe that how and when someone dies has already been determined at birth? Whether it be by old age, genetic disease or the seeming randomness of getting hit by a bus? --CLB]

May I ask what the 'who' is in your statement that is determining at their birth how they die? Is it you? Scott? A clever looking tree?

Don't worry, that pain in your brain is just it trying to tick over. Take a deep breath, wait for your pulse to slow and resume basking in that sensation that feels like free will.

[jerry w]

"Time flies like an arrow,
Fruit flies like a banana."

Groucho Marx

jerrywolfe@sbcglobal.net

[Scott]

Scott,

Ok, ok, there's no free will, I get that part.
What I want to know next is what glorious new future awaits?

Scott

[terry k]

I checked out the original paper in the journal PLOS (a pretty good journal). Usually media reports on scientific experiments tend to be quite far removed from what actually is going on, such that one really has to read the original paper, but this time the media did a decent job describing the author's conclusions.

One interesting thing about the paper is that the authors thanked a Martin Heisenberg for useful discussions. Martin is a Drosophila geneticist and son of that other famous Heisenberg...

[Michael Casey]

What on earth is wrong with you people? Of *course* plants and bacteria and rocks have souls, and if they have souls, they must have free will.

And oh yes, they most certainly do make choices.

Prove they don't!@

[deathpangsofsorrow]

I liked what General Lethal said. If you define free will the way I've hallucinated Scott's definition, then it's pretty much impossible. That's not really the idea of "free will," but I don't think Scott cares. It's more fun to rile people up. (I'd do the same.)

By the way - a good debate tip for all comments and their respective authors - try convincing someone by proposing alternative theories, not by refuting their beliefs. We can go around in circles forever about free will the way it's been going (which is fine, because it's amusing), but the debate won't get anywhere. This isn't a binary operation. Introduce new elements and ideas, instead of repeating and rehashing old ones, and you might have a shot.

-deathpangsofsorrow

P.S. Scott - has anyone ever thanked you for your tireless efforts in the field of entertainment? Regardless... thanks!

[Billy B]

What in the fuck has fruit flies got to do with you monkeys and your perception of freewill? Fruit flies live and die on a different level of a life order than you do.

They don't build things, they don't think about much, they don't over populate the planet and fuck things up. They are frigging fruit flies, they live and die without a lot of thought.
Billy B

[Allen]

In my opinion, "Free Will" is the idea that something else other than nature contributes to a creatures actions. However, nature does contribute to a creatures actions, but something else does as well. So therefore determinism and randomness both contribute, which logically means that the creature in question has free will. If there is no predetermined way to discern what a creature will do, than it is acting randomly. If one can determine it, than it can logically be determined. Therefore, both are present in fruit flies, so the fruit flies have free will.

[LA Clay]

Water has FREE WILL! Given the constraints of this study this must be true. Some water decides to become snow in paterns completely unique and random. Plus it decides if it want's to evaporate from a lake and become rain or part of the ocean.

Think about that next time you pee in the Ocean!

[jeqp]

The study did address determinism, and also ruled that out. The researchers found that *mathematically* the behaviour was neither random nor determined.

I have no idea whether the maths is valid.