Free Flight

So you put fruit flies in an all white room, lacking normal sensory cues, and what do they do? They fly around, of course - they're flies.

So a guy did an experiment like this to see what sort of flight path they would take.

He figured that they would take a random path. But they didn't. They followed the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior, and did whatever they wanted in a spontaneous yet non-random way.

"Our results eliminate two alternative explanations of this spontaneous turning behavior that would run counter to free will, namely randomness and pure determinism," he said in an e-mail.

I think this figures, since most animals routinely use whatever awareness they have to navigate alternatives.

Is it such a surprise
That those pesky fruit flies
With all their agility
Show some ability
To turn and to swerve
With spontaneous verve?