Continued, part 2.

    Some contributors during this recent exchange questioned whether
we had really encountered censorship on this issue (after all,
scientists are objective and would welcome divergent views, right?).
I'll not go into that matter, but we have extensive documentation
that such blockage does occur in science.  As examples, one can read:

    http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/aoac.htm

and:

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/EXC.htm

and:

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/latimes.htm

    The material on those web sites reveals the very human nature of
science in action.

    You can also open any book written by bee language advocates this
last couple of decades and find extremely little (or no) mention of
our experimental results, dating all the way back to the 1960s.

    Last Sunday Dave Cushman posted this statement: "It is up to you
what you accept and what you ignore, but if you wish to have your
point of view recognized by others, you must encompass all aspects of
a behavior whether you personally believe they are irrelevant or not,
if you leave out any element you are not telling the whole story."

    Correct.  Bee language advocates have done the bee community a
great disservice this past three decades by providing only evidence
that bolsters one side in the controversy.  Those who have read our
book and papers know that we have not hesitated to provide evidence
that meshes with the language hypothesis -- while still not
hesitating to critique that evidence.  For instance, the following
paper (1991 in the American Zoologist) shows how evidence gathered by
both sides can be reconciled:

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/az1991.htm

    You should all realize that Columbia University Press would not
have published our 1990 book without thorough review by qualified
scholars.  Neither would we have been invited to write the 1991 paper
for the American Zoologist nor get the 2002 paper into print in the
Journal of Insect Behavior if we didn't have a case.

    Advent of the Internet broke the log jam in this matter.  Barry
Birkey helped immeasurable by forming "Point of View" and providing
access to most of our publications that language advocates had
ignored so long.

    I provided therein a chronology of the bee language controversy
from our point of view:

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/readme.htm

    By going to that chronology and clicking on various URLs, anyone
can read the original publications, including von Frisch's 1937 paper
and excerpts from his 1943 paper (in English -- original in German).

        -- To be continued in the next posting --

--
Adrian M. Wenner                (805) 963-8508 (home office phone)
967 Garcia Road                 [log in to unmask]
Santa Barbara, CA  93103        www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm

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*
*    "We not only believe what we see:
*  to some extent we see what we believe."
*
*                           Richard Gregory (1970)
*
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