Subject: [SciPol 178] Re: Item no. 6 in the ScienceWeek list for Feb. 23, 2007.

From: "Anderson, John" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:22:40 -0500

Well said.

JA

John Anderson, Ph.D.
Department of Chemistry & Physics
University of North Florida

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf
Of Dan Agin
Sent: Wednesday, 28 February, 2007 11:00 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [SciPol 175] Re: Item no. 6 in the ScienceWeek list for Feb.
23, 2007.

This bee-dance controversy is an old item on the Internet, here revived
maybe by a transgendered Ruth Rosin writing as "Ross Goodyear". That's
fine. But I think it would be helpful to cut posts to eliminate dragging
along everything written before -- keep things short. And second, I
would like to see some discussion of the fact that the opponents of the
dance idea have plenty of rhetoric and hardly and published evidence to
support their position.  Claims that this or that idea was "stillborn"
fifty years ago don't do much for science. Rhetorical criticisms of
published experiments also don't do much. We need experimental data,
current and contemporary experimental data, that contradicts the
prevailing view -- if that prevailing view is to be discarded. Arguments
that Wenner did this or that years ago are baloney -- if no one is
taking the time to repeat Wenner's experiments. Arguments that appear in
the American Bee Journal are not evidence of anything -- it's a trade
journal for beekeepers, not a scientific journal manned by scientists.
So my suggestion is never mind the rhetoric, where is the hard evidence
that bees cannot communicate with each other? They certainly communicate
enough to form an insect "society". It would certainly be adaptive if
"scouts" could communicate in some way the existence and location of
flower beds. The problem of implied "mathematical reasoning" is vacuous,
since a crystal forms an almost perfect geometrical arrangement without
ever "thinking" about it. It seems to me a large part of the so-called
dance controversy lies in some people imposing an implicit dichotomy
between human solutions and "animal" solutions. But these are all
biological solutions, ultimately based on physiology and physics and
chemistry, and in principle there is no reason why the nervous system of
one bee could not communicate with the nervous system of another bee. So
please let's can the rhetoric and talk about hard evidence. As for
people who have not heard about the bee dance controversy before, please
be advised that most of the biologists working today accept the view
that a bee dance "language" of some sort exists. Of course they may be
wrong, but no one has yet proved them wrong.

Dan Agin

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