Bob Harrison wrote:
"you can always question the competence of the person who carried out
the observation"

Good point. I have met Thomas Seeley, Ben Oldroyd, Madeleine Beekman,
Donald Griffin, etc. The work of these people and the quality of their
thinking seems *to me* to be unimpeachable.

* * *

Recent research has uncovered an impressive degree of flexibility and
variability of the honey bee dance language, making it a prime
candidate to explore the possibility of awareness and consciousness in
invertebrates.

By and large Griffin's writings on this subject have met with harsh
criticism primarily because his critics continue to define
consciousness in a way that excludes the possibility that we can find
out if it exists in animals and then claim that Griffin has not
produced any definitive evidence, the 'smoking gun', for his belief in
animal consciousness.

Undaunted, Griffin carried on till the very end and herein lies an
important lesson both for us as individuals and for us as a scientific
community. If some of us are inspired to persist in studying what we
believe is important in the face of widespread scepticism, Donald
Griffin's efforts would not have gone in vain. The lesson for the
scientific community is more complex and perhaps controversial.

The lesson I would draw is that the scientific community should find
ways of identifying the best minds and give them the licence to pursue
their ideas unfettered by excessive peer pressure, up until the time
their ideas begin to fail. This is the only way we will know the
limits of any idea. The scientific community has much to gain from
competent radicals such as Donald Griffin.

Raghavendra Gadagkar
Centre for Ecological Sciences
Bangalore

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