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Date: | Fri, 15 Jan 2021 20:23:55 -0500 |
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Hi all
I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Wenner, and have corresponded with him over the years. But I do think he was on the wrong side of the battle between reductionism and an expanded view of consciousness. Recent work by Tania Munz supports this view:
The debate did not just turn on the pivot of odor versus dance communication. The two camps were also operating under vastly different paradigms. Although von Frisch and Wenner seemed to meet in the pages of Science, where their aims and methods appeared roughly comparable, their visions of animals and their behaviors differed radically. When von Frisch looked into the hive, he saw an animal capable of the most remarkable feat—communication about the precise location of food sources. In contrast, Adrian Wenner saw bees as simple stimulus-response organisms.
Donald Griffin had of course been a longtime supporter of von Frisch and the chief architect of his 1949 lecture tour of the United States. Griffin linked Wenner’s obstinacy to his behaviorist tendencies but felt the situation was not hopeless. He sensed that behaviorism had run its course and was giving way to other approaches:
"There seems to be an almost ideological reluctance, bound up I suspect with the strong current of behavioristic reductionism that has been so prominent among behavioral scientists in America. I am convinced that this [behaviorist] tide has turned, and I can assure you that despite the many foolish publications from Wenner and his colleagues, almost no one takes them very seriously. "
Wenner and two colleagues wrote an indignant letter to Scientific American, protesting that E. O. Wilson had made no mention of their challenge in his lengthy discussion of animal communication, Wilson replied, “I didn’t mention the ‘controversy’ over the honeybee waggle dance because I no longer feel that the discussion of the subject even merits the word.”
Although Wenner himself was no simple behaviorist, Griffin’s and [Ernst] Mayr’s reactions to the debate reveal that his resistance to von Frisch’s theory was ascribed to precisely such tendencies. Indeed, von Frisch’s case was picked up by a range of scientists reacting to the overly restrictive behaviorism that had dominated much of the century’s American studies of behavior.
The Dancing Bees, by Tania Munz. (2016). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Munz is the vice president for research and scholarship at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. Previously, she was a lecturer at Northwestern
University and a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Also see: The Hive Mind. https://www.beeculture.com/the-hive-mind/
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