Dances of Honeybees

Hi Isis

It seems that we are reading some of the same books! I was lucky to see
Donald Griffin a few years back at Cornell. Ironically, over the years he
had been chastised for his non-mainstream views, somewhat as Dr. Wenner has
been. Even though their views are at opposite ends of the spectrum on this
issue.

He died two years ago. From his obit: "While an undergraduate at Harvard in
1938, he and a fellow student Robert Galambos used microphones to prove that
bats 'see in the dark' by emitting ultrasonic sounds and listening for the
return echoes, solving the mystery of how bats navigate in the dark and
catch their insect prey."

Donald R. Griffin wrote in his 1976 book "The Question of Animal Awareness":

The general feeling that our species is uniquely superior has suffered a
series of intellectual setbacks beginning with the Copernican and Darwinian
revolutions. Biological evolution is universally accepted by behavioral
scientists as a historical fact. Animals are used as surrogate "models" for
behavioral investigations on the implicit assumption that principles
discovered this way are applicable to our own species. Yet, when questions
of communication  and language arise, even hard-nosed behaviorists take for
granted a large element of discontinuity. To argue that language is unique
to man and, therefore, no matter how complex animal communication turns out
to be, it cannot be continuous with human language, is indefensibly circular.

Later, in "Animal Minds" (1992:

Half a century ago, when symbolic communication in animals was unknown and
generally believed to be impossible, H. H. Price (1938) conceded that if
animals did use symbols we would have to assume that they have minds.
Symbolic communication is especially evident in the dances of honeybees.

More recently, Marc Bekoff wrote in his 2004 book "Minding Animals":

Darwin emphasized the importance of evolutionary mental continuity among
animals and learning about the worlds of the animals themselves when he
wrote about animal minds. It is narrow minded to believe that we are the
only species with minds or the only species that can think, make plans, and
experience pain and pleasure. Donald Griffin stressed that it is the
flexibility and versatility of behavior that provide strong evidence of
animal minds and consciousness. [He] suggested that consciousness evolved to
allow adaptively flexible behavior.

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