I have followed Ruth Rosin's postings for many years. Essentially, she does not believe that honeybees have a complex method of communication, nor a collective decision making system, because they are insects and insects "can't" have these things. They are not people, after all! She wrote on 2 Mar 2006:
> To Mike Stoops, Think of a million and one qualitatively very complex things that humans can do, and honeybees could never even come close, and you might realise that you need to completely exclude almost everything that humans can do, when you are dealing with honeybees. Not only that, but you are "the crown of evolution", with a qualitatively complex "psychic level" that is higher than that of any other living organism. And I could not even begin to explain here what the term "psychic level" means; except to say that it roughly fits what we mean when we speak of "brains".
* * *
More recent research has shown that this a priori assumption is in fact false, and the neural networks necessary for such information processing and conceptualization do in fact exist and can be mapped.
> In 1959, when computers filled entire rooms (and there was perhaps a perception that better computers would have to fill factory halls), Richard Feynman pointed the way in the direction of miniaturization in information technology. In a lecture famously entitled ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom’ he asked ‘Why cannot we write the entire . . . Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin?’. At the time, the audience might have been equally sceptical as when Darwin, impressed by ants’ ‘wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers and affections’, proclaimed that an ant’s brain, despite its size being ‘the quarter of a small pin’s head. . . is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man’
>
> The brains discussed in this special feature are staggeringly small when compared with those of humans; indeed, multiple times smaller than the 2 x 2 mm voxels (three- dimensional pixels) that form the unit of resolution in common brain imaging studies on humans. Some of the smallest insects’ entire brains are equivalent in size to only a few human neurons [3]. Nonetheless, these brains contain the full circuitry needed for identification of mates, food and oviposition sites, the motor routines to reach these targets, the control to activate the correct behaviour pattern at the right time, and learning and memory.
>
> And recent years have seen a remarkable surge in studies on cognitive performance in insects, and the possibilities of numerosity [11], concept formation [12], attention-like processes [13] and consensus building in groups [14] are now seriously considered. This special feature is about raising appreciation for the complexity of these phenomena generated by tiny brains, and to attempt a few small steps in the direction of understanding how these feats are underpinned by neural circuits, and their evolution (and their costs) in the economy of nature.
> In certain highly active miniature-brained animals such as flies and bees, reduced representational capacity may be compensated by higher real-time sampling of the world. As we are approaching an age where the understanding of complete neural circuitry of entire insect brains is within reach, answering these questions on a mechanistic level is becoming increasingly realistic.
Information processing in miniature brains, L. Chittka and P. Skorupski
Queen Mary University of London, Research Centre for Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences
Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Peter Loring Borst
128 Lieb Road
Spencer, NY 14883
607 280 4253
peterloringborst.com
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm
|
