Hi all,
When Wenner stated that the DL controversy is not about evidence, he
obviously did not mean to say that evidence should not count. In pointing
out that DL supporters ignore his publication on honeybee swarms, he made it
quite clear that what he meant is that counter-evidence does not count for
staunch DL supporters, who simply ignore it.
Griggs Mike believed that there is no doubt that honeybees have a DL, in
other words there is no doubt that all the essential evidence for the
existence of that DL has been provided. Therefore, there can be no
controversy over the availability of that evidence. And the controversy is
only whether the term "language" is applicable here. As I pointed out in an
earlier response to his message, no valid evidence for the existence of the
honeybee DL has ever been provided by any DL supporter. Instead, there has
only been very strong experimental evidence, coming from. many different
directions, against the DL hypothesis. I don't know whether he understood
that. And I, therefore, have no idea whether he still believes that
honeybees have a DL.
Mike Stoops is convinced that honeybees have a DL, simply because he wishes
them to have such a DL. Well, evolution is not an "intelligent designer"
that one can pray to, in the hope that it will grant one's wishes. And if it
ever endowed honeybees with the ability to obtain & use spatial information
contained in foragers'-dances, they have never yet shown any evidence of
that.
Fischer continues to practice his own personal brand of "science". I pointed
out, over & over again, that if the radar-tracked bees in the study by Riley
et al. (in Nature 2005) used a DL, then, plain logical thinking leads to
the inevitable conclusion that they they could only have used a non-existent
DL. Fischer still does not get that. I repeatedly pointed out very many
problems in the data obtained by the authors of that study. But Fischer
chooses to ignore all those problems.
He now claims, regarding the observed by the lidar to fly to the mine-field
must have been scouts. Moreover, he claimed that there was no dancing in
the tests done by Jerry and his colleagues, because there was no food in
those tests. He even suggests that Jerry must have been joking when he
stated that if honeybees used a DL, he expected new bees to arrive
primarily in the vicinity of the foragers'-feeder that was a few yards away
from the hive. The only "joke" here is that the foragers'-feeder provided
the food that in Fischer's mind did not exist at all. And the reason Jerry
expected most new bees to go primarily to the vicinity of the feeder, had
they used DL information, is that the foragers that foraged at the feeder
must have danced in the hive. So here are the dances that in Fischer's mind
did not exist atall. Most dance-attendants were, then expected to leave the
hive as regular recruits. In fact, if the foragers'-feeder was only a few
yards from the hive, the foragers might have performed only round dances.
And according to the DL hypothesis recruits were, then, expected to find
sources with the odors associated with the foragers'-food, i.e. the odors of
explosives, only near the hive, within the round dance range for the
specific strain of honeybees Jerry & his colleagues used. The
foragers'-feeder was, however, deliberately set far away from the
mine-field. If they used DL information none of the regular recruits were
expected to find the mine-field at all. As for scouts,scouts were not
expected to go specifically to the mine-field either. Moreover, field-bees
tend not to scout if they can be recruited by active foragers that are
bringing food into the hive.
The only sensible explanation of the result Jerry and his colleagues
obtained is that the bees that flew to the mine-field were regular recruits,
that had attended the dances of the foragers that brought in food from the
foragers'-feeder. As dance-attendants they developed an attraction for the
odors associated with that food, i.e. the odors of explosives (through a
conditioning process where the food they received from dancing foragers
during dance-attendance served as the "reward"). Once they left the hive
they did not at all search for sources of such odors only within the round
dance range, as expected from the DL hypothesis. Instead, most of them found
the mine-field, simply because the mine field had many sources of
explosive-odors, probably with a far higher concentration of such odors in
each of those sources, compared to the single foragers'-feeder.
The "sleights of mind" that fanatic DL supporters are able to play upon
themselves are, sometimes mind-boggling, and often also pretty amusing.
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")
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