--- Kevin Mitchell, geneticist and neuroscientist, quoted in Clare Wilson, Free will: Can neuroscience reveal if your choices are yours to make?, New Scientist, 30 September 2023
Excerpt
And neuroscience isn’t the only branch of biology that has something to say about free will, says Mitchell. “If we want to understand how human beings do things – that is, where causal power [for our actions] comes from – then that question extends back to say: ‘Well, how does any organism do something?'” The answer, says Mitchell, lies in the evolution of biological agency, or the ability to act with intention or purpose, an argument he makes in his new book Free Agents: How evolution gave us free will.
As Mitchell sees it, when the first simple life forms appeared on Earth about 3.7 billion years ago, one of their most interesting essential qualities was that they did stuff. Before that, things happened: grains of sand tumbled around, chemicals reacted and volcanoes spewed out lava. But those were inert physical processes. The first life forms, however, used energy to work against the second law of thermodynamics – the principle that everything tends to become more disorganised over time – and hence stay alive. “Agency is a really core property of living things that we almost take for granted, it’s so basic,” says Mitchell.
