First of all, I never noticed that whims and whimsical are derived from the same root word before (I'll have to OED that tomorrow) until I was filling in the title of this post ... this has very little to do with the other whimsical notions that I feel the need to post about ... I suppose this itself is a whimsical thought, a random rambling, but I digress ...
As I was leaving work around midnight an odd thought crossed my mind - my entire work schedule revolves around the life cycles of flies (common pests for most people, and probably even more so for fly technicians) and more importantly (and oddly) my labor schedule is most drastically affected by the age of consent for flies. It's known in Drosophila melanogaster that 3-4 hours is a "safe" amount of time to assume that females have retained their virginity. That would make some age around 5-6 hours old the "age of consent" at which point the female flies might have been contaminated with the sperm of their siblings, fathers, uncles and possibly even males with a 2 generation gap (grandfathers and granduncles). Such is that way of maintaining an fly "line" where inbreeding is unavoidable and in some cases intentional. It's disgusting to think about in a human context, but it allows us, in some cases, to have almost entirely genetically identical siblings, and families, allowing us to collect lots of data about a "single fly" genome.
In my case, I've taken advantage of these breeding capabilities to compare nutrition, enzyme kinetics, innate immunity and chromosomal segregation and will eventually get to perform artificial selection experiments on both individual lines (each line essentially representing 1 fly genome) as well as intentionally crossed lines and population cages (where we have a mixture of crosses of sequenced lines so we know all the possible alleles at all the loci, but any individual fly could have any mixture of said alleles if linkage disequilibrium is low (which it should be in such populations based on how I'll breed them)). In particular the thought of selection population cages where we know all the possible outcomes is fascinating because it allows us to "observe" the process of genome optimization in a population cage where there is theoretically a very low inbreeding coefficient and low LD due to the effective high population size (I could list off a number of other population genetics terms that can more aptly explain the point I'm trying to make, but at some point it wouldn't make a difference to the one seagull reading this post so I won't bother).
Either way, especially in experiments like the population cage selection, I'm subject to the whims of flies (drying out food, age of consent (i.e. female virginity), sticky wings, etc.). It's a damn good time.
Somehow when I thought of "The whims of flies" I imagined it as a metaphor for our own lives, where the people occupying the world around us (known and unknown) are the flies. It's not a complete thought yet (I supposed very few things are), but there's something there. In the end, we all eat, breed and live in our own mess, with very little impact on the flies in the next vial over or the bigger laboratory around us.
Yeah, that sounds kind of corny ... but it's a start, I suppose. I think I'm looking at it too close from the wrong perspective. Anyways, the idea that we live mostly on whims (as opposed to constantly direct and intentional actions) seems on the surface to be very true. While many of our "whims" could be very intentional actions planned and executed by each of our own subconscious, it seems to me that most of our actions are quite arbitrary (e.g. how far to move left or right to avoid colliding with oncoming traffic, when to notice and react to an itch, how much to rotate our heads versus just shifting our eyes). Many of these are trained in behaviors that we have corrected consciously and unconsciously throughout our lives, but that so called "judgment" that enables us to make seemingly arbitrary decisions.
I guess I'm coming at this idea of whims from multiple directions. In one way, I'm saying that whims are mindless, random thoughts. But under the surface, one might argue that there are no such things as true whims. Every seemingly arbitrary behavior is decided by an unfathomably complex algorithm processed by our brains to decide our every action. In many ways, it takes the fun out of the concept of "free will" to say that our every whim, a momentary passing thought that may or may not be put into action in some way, is in fact pre-determined in that instant when a choice much be made (discrete or continuous) by all the events that preceded it.
This idea that all the previous events together combine to make our current decisions is a universal concept. Many literary concepts, such as Glinda's "Great Book of Records" (which I've explained in more detail in a currently unfinished blog post about Oz), which magically lists every event in history as it occurs, utilize this idea that we are the sum of the events of the past to determine what will happen or make sense of current events.
It is in this way ironic that this train of thought leads to pre-determination. In spite of taking the argument that our whims are determined by a gigantic algorithm (rather than a so-far unmentioned "soul"), it seems to me like true free will is unlikely. Obviously, this does not prevent us from retaining apparent free will. That is to say, that since we are not consciously aware of how every circumstance in existence together affects our actions, we can operate under apparent free will to make our conscious minds feel like there is meaning to our actions.
I suppose there are several ideas here that I'd like to write more about in the future, but in regards to how all these ideas apply to "the whims of flies" it becomes more clear to me that the phrase is almost an oxymoron. From everything I've described, flies appear mechanical to us, lacking even the appearance of "whims," and even in supposedly more complex organisms, our "whims" are nothing more than a product of previous events. So to say "the whims of flies" to me is to imply free will (or arbitrary behavior) where there is none.
The future use of such a phrase in my lexicon is still unclear, but at least roughly, "being subjected to the whims of flies" would apparently be to voluntarily or involuntarily forgo your own apparent free will to someone else or even the world itself, all of which also lack true free will. In other words, it means that you are conscious giving up your claim to free will, or in even other words, you're giving up and becoming truly mechanical.
