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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