A beekeeper who likes old bee books cited to me the names of Huber, Von
Frish, and Tom Seeley, crowning them "giants in the field".
I countered with my own view, that older research is supplanted by newer
research, making the older work obsolete, and more often than not,
misleading as compared to the newer work that has supplanted it. (In
physics, relying on older work can be downright dangerous, as "shaper
tools", tend to be, ummm... much sharper.)
So, I proposed that Huber would be cited far less often than Von Frish, for
example.
I have two of Dr. Seeley's recent books in digital form, so, to put the two
opposing theories to the test, I wrote a one-line regex that counted. (Many
beekeepers speak arcane forgotten dialects like "sed", "awk", "regex", and
"perl", as geek-beeks abound. )
In Wisdom of the Hive (1995, 265 pages) there are 240 citations to
publications, 20 mentions of Von Frish, no mention of Huber anywhere in
the book.
In Honeybee Democracy (2010, 174 pages) there are 252 date references
(mostly in citations) in the notes, no mention of either Von Frish or Huber
anywhere in the book
What this simple citation data says is crystal clear:
1) The older the claimed "collective intelligence" is, the less useful it is
to a coherent understanding of the current state of knowledge, with a
fall-off rate that is greater than logarithmic. This is not just Huber, its
everyone.
2) The bulk of the useful data is recent, and the more recent date is both
more useful, and cited much more often.
This is because the more recent findings are ever-closer approximations of
the truth than what came before.
Our overall progress is an asymptotic approach to the holy grail of "truth"
and "fact". Fresh is best. Old may be entertaining and enlightening, but
not something to bet the farm on.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Data Follows
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Wisdom of The Hive was published in 1995, and the number of citations from
each decade are as follows:
1800s-1900s: 2
1910s: 0
1920s: 7
1930s: 2
1940s: 5
1950s: 15
1960s: 19
1970s: 41
1980s: 90
1990-95: 61 (equates to 122 for the decade)
Honeybee Democracy, published in 2010, cites the following dates in the
notes section:
1800-1900: 3
1910s: 0
1920s: 0
1930s: 1
1940s: 3
1950s: 25
1960s: 9
1970s: 23
1980s: 42
1990s: 44
2000s: 105
The breakdown for the 2000s is interesting for a book published in 2010, as
follows:
2001: 10
2002: 8
2003: 15
2004: 8
2005: 9
2006: 10
2007: 13
2008: 17
2009: 14
2010: 1
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