Dear BEE-L subscribers,

    Honestly, I did not expect that my essay of two days ago would evoke 
such instantaneous and fiery response in such a short time.  I usually 
spend a few days digesting input from others before responding.

    While I consider the recent inputs in adamant support of dance 
language, let me add a note about how some of us bee researcher get to 
this point.  Peter Borst already gave us a sketch of Tom Seeley and how 
he wasn't really an entomologist.  On Mar 6, 2006, at 8:17 AM, Jerry 
Bromenshenk wrote (in small part):

> Bill said:
>
> <BTW, Jerry, I thought the reason you shifted to bees to find land 
> mines is you ran out of graduate students.>
>
> I hope that's tongue in cheek.  I've had some wonderful graduate 
> students, but I now encourage undergraduates, rarely take on graduate 
> students.
>
> The reason is simple. Its due to my history and how I'm funded.
>
> I've worked in bee research for 31 year.  I came out of school in the 
> wrong place, at the wrong time -- or maybe in the right place or the 
> right time.

    I thank Jerry for that long exposition about his career.  My 
experience has had some parallels.


    I, too, grew up on a farm in what would today be considered dire 
poverty (no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no insulation in the 
house, or central heating  — except for a pot-bellied stove in our 
small living room), and not enough money for food or clothes — 
depression days!.  Nine people in a small four-room house didn't help, 
either.

    But our community did stress integrity and honesty!  (An uncle of 
mine once said, "Honesty as a policy is dishonest!)  My home town 
(Roseau) in NW Minnesota is now a STAR town in that state.  My best 
friend through 12 years of school, Bob Bergland, became Secretary of 
Agriculture under Jimmy Carter, who asked him if he was honest before 
putting him on the job.

    That adherence to honesty is perhaps the major reason I stick to my 
guns on the bee language controversy.  I have no choice!

    After high school, I received formal training in electronics, 
mathematics, and physics, while at the same time becoming deeply 
involved in commercial beekeeping.  That exposure sparked an interest 
in biology, and I then studied biology for the first time in my life 
and earned a PhD in zoology at the University of Michigan with a 
speciality in animal behavior.

    Earlier, while in graduate courses in mathematics, I had gained a 
thorough background in logic.  At Michigan, while in an advanced course 
in genetics, I learned the distinction between direct and indirect 
evidence.  At the time a debate raged about whether protein or DNA was 
responsible for genetic transmission.  Fortunately, the scientists 
involved did not reach a consensus that protein was sometimes 
responsible and sometimes DNA!   (A type of logic we now see pressed by 
some in our current controversy.)

    Unlike Jerry, though, my wanderings through life as an adult somehow 
led me into a professor's job.  I must confess that I didn't really 
grasp all this "clawing one's way to the top" that I have seen so many 
academics engaged in.  I just continued my zeal to try and understand 
what Nature was all about and try not to impose my wishes upon Her.

    My advancement through the academic ranks benefited from the fact 
that the University of California has an excellent set of checks and 
balances.  Faculty members at UC, for the most part, get promoted (at 
least in earlier days) largely on the basis of the quality of their 
teaching and research — not on how much grant funding they take in.  
The department doesn't have the final say; campus-wide committees 
insure that promotions are merited.

    In time, I taught a well-attended course:  "The Nature of Biological 
Research," where I instilled in the students the importance of 
teachings by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn (names quite unfamiliar at the 
time to biologists in general).

    When my colleagues and I inadvertently challenged the bee language 
hypothesis through experiments such as I discussed in my last posting, 
our chances to get outside funding dried up completely — anonymous 
referees, completely committed to bee language dogma, would not permit 
approval of our funding requests.

    That's O.K. undergraduate students flocked in to help as volunteers. 
  Then I took a two-decade leave of absence into marine biology 
(crustacean growth and reproduction) while waiting for tempers to cool 
(not very cool yet, I guess).

    If I had to do it all over again, though, I would have to go the 
same route — rely on what the bees "tell" me.  That way was never easy 
— it included loss of all summer salaries from grants for the rest of 
my career.  It also meant that my graduate students could not have 
assistance from grants for their research.  They didn't mind too much.  
We developed a great camaraderie and we all toughed it out — and had 
great fun doing real science.

    For more information on my career in this area, check out:

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/readme.htm

    In my science methods course (as above), I used the dance language 
controversy as an example of science in action.  That included the 
following admonition:   "...the bee language controversy continues to 
reach  an ever-wider audience ... and promises to become an object 
lesson in how science progresses  - not so much by "proofs" and 
"discoveries"  as by the generation and replacement of hypotheses."


												Adrian

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