Flies With Free Will
Brembs and his colleagues weren’t so sure. To investigate whether fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are automatons or not, they tethered flies in a completely uniform, white enclosure. The flies had no visual cues from the environment and are fixed in space. Their behavior should therefore resemble random noise. But a mathematical analysis showed that it did not, and no random computer models successfully modeled the flies’ behavior, the scientists report in the open-access journal PloS ONE....