Access

Published online 16 May 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news070514-8

Column

Do flies have free will?

Neuroscience can't show us the source of free will, says Philip Ball, because it's not a scientific concept.

Gluing a fly's head to a wire and watching it trying to fly sounds more like the sort of experiment a naughty schoolboy would conduct than one that turns out to have philosophical and legal implications.

But that's the way it is for the work reported this week by a team of neurobiologists in the online journal PLoS One1.

Comments

Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.