There’s an interesting news story from last year about fruit flies and free will that I found via The Pinocchio Theory blog in this post on theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.

This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study on fruit flies involved placing them on hooks with wires tying them down in a white environment devoid of resources. It turns out that their behavior formed a pattern. specifically, a Lévy distribution. If anyone out there can explain the math on this, that would be great because I’m definitely lacking in that area.

What I don’t understand is that how that implies free will. The scientists quoted in the article seem to be saying that the flies exhibited spontaneous behavior, but how does that jive with being a Lévy distribution?

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.

I understand that this is a news article about a scientific study, so it’s going to be an imperfect representation of the study’s findings, but it seems as if these scientists would benefit from a dialog with philosophers, preferably philosophers that I personally find interesting.

I’ll return to this idea later, most likely. I’d like if I could get some dialog going on this before I come back to it though, so… what was I saying? I was distracted while trying to kill a fruit fly. Those little bastards are fast.