To Griggs and All,
The study by Seeley, that you noted, did not at all exclude odors from the
equation. On the contrary. He deliberately "baited" the small hive boxes he
offered as prospective nests, with lures made primarily from the major
extracts of Nasanov gland odors.
Humans form quorums to reach joint decisions. I doubt that any other animals
do. Honeybees certainly do not do anything like that. A honeybee dances only
when chased by other bees that are attracted by the odors it carries. When
nest-scouts find a new site that has more attractive odors than sites found
by other scouts, swarm-mates gradually switch to chasing after the scouts
that carry more attractive odors. The other nest-scouts that are not being
chased anymore, do not dance. They may even eventually attend dances of the
scouts that carry more attractive odors, and if they find (by use of odor
alone all along), the site advertised by such scouts, they adsorb on their
body-hair the more attractive odors from that site, then attract swarm-mate,
which will result in a dance.
The DL controversy is definitely over "what information is passed among
honeybees". The fact that human scientists (including Seeley), can obtain
from honeybee-dances information about the approximate location of the site
the dancers had visited, provides no evidence whatsoever, that honeybees can
obtain & use such information. Seeley might not have bothered to explain
that which goes without saying, for anyone who knows anything about it,
i.e. that scientists can obtain the information only by relying on
preliminary research on the relations between various aspects of the dance
and the distance & direction of the site the dancers had visited. Moreover,
this preliminary research must be done separately for each honeybee species
and strain from whose dances researchers wish to obtain the information.
It also goes without saying that honeybees never engage in any scientific
research. So how can you logically jump from knowing that scientists can
obtain that information (once you know how they do it), to the conclusion
that honeybees must be able to do the same?
In spite of an almost endless number of ever-new claims published by staunch
DL supporters (starting with v. Frisch himself), during the past 60 years,
to have experimentally confirmed the existence of the DL, they have never
even come close to achieving any such confirmation. Instead, there have only
been experimental results, coming from many different directions, that
grossly contradict the DL hypothesis.
This is not surprising at all, because the DL hypothesis was stillborn when
v. Frisch fully justifiably concluded on the basis of his first study on
honeybee-recruitment, that honeybee-recruits use odor alone, and NO
information about the location of any food. More than 20 years later
he concluded that his initial conclusion must have been an error (which it
never was), and "corrected" that error by claiming that recruits did use
information about the location of the foragers' food-source, at least to an
extent of knowing approximately where to search for odors from that source.
It was, however, his erroneous conclusion that honeybees have a very poor,
human-like sensitivity to odors (which preceded his studies on
honeybee-recruitment, and tainted most of his work on honeybee-recruitment),
which led him to the erroneous conclusion that his initial, fully justified
conclusion, needed to be corrected.
Ever since v. Frisch "repaired" his initial conclusion "which was never
broke" in the first place, staunch DL supporters have been "chasing
phantoms", working ever harder to discover the essential, but ever-elusive
evidence for the existence of the honeybee DL, i.e. actually striving to
revive the stillborn DL hypothesis.
Anyone who urges staunch DL supporters to quit, soon finds himself turned
into a pariah. When Wenner & his team launched the opposition to the DL
hypothesis in Science of 1967, the DL hypothesis had already become a
revered ruling paradigm. By 1969 Wenner's team was already chided in Science
for daring to criticise "an eminent scientist like von Frisch". Since 1973
staunch DL supporters have even had the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine or
Physiology behind them. How dare anyone question the Nobel Committee? Well,
I do.And I am by no means the only one, nor the first on, to be fully
convinced of that. Moreover, I do not hesitate to label that specific Nobel
Prize the greatest goof in the history of science.
--
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")
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