To those interested:
Recently, I have been able to attach to an article published in Nature
(2006), Oct. 26, a very brief review-comment, posted (Feb. 9) on the
free peer-review online JournalReview.com
Here it is:
-----------------------------
The Honeybee "Dance Language" Never Existed
R. Rosin
Contrary to members of the Honeybee Genome Sequencing Consortium
[Nature, (2006). 443: 930-949.] the honeybee "dance language" (DL)
(whose "discovery was first announced in a scientific journal in 1946)
never existed. V. Frisch's DL hypothesis was simply stillborn, thanks
to his first study on honeybee-recruitment (published in an extensive
summary in 1923), with results that led him to fully justifiably
conclude that honeybee-recruits use odor alone, and no information
about the location of any food. He held on to that conclusion for more
than 20 years.
Unfortunately, after the inception of his revolutionary DL hypothesis,
he became erroneously convinced that the results obtained in that
study were mere insignificant anomalies, not worth further mention.
Thus, for over 60 years staunch DL sup****ters, starting with v. Frisch
himself, have persisted in an almost endless series of utterly futile
attempts to experimentally confirm the stillborn DL hypothesis. This
has inevitably led only to ever more intricate feats of self-delusion,
often turned mass delusion. The major cause for the persistence is the
erroneous belief that honeybee dancing is genetically predetermined.
The honeybee DL, therefore, must exist, as the only possible solution
to the problem of the adaptive value of honeybee-dances, which must be
solved to avoid a severe crisis in The Theory of Evolution.
The problem of the adaptive value of honeybee-dances is simply a non-
problem. The dances constitute a quantitatively complex combination of
many different components, which all occur also outside the dance, and
separately from one another, and most occur also in other insects.
Problems of adaptive value must, therefore, be addressed to each of
the components. But the combination does not have to have an
additional adaptive value of its own, as a combination. [See Rosin.
(2000). Amer. Bee J.,140: 98.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
