The other day I was chatting with a colleague about teaching ethics to science majors. This colleague teaches ethics to business majors and was, I think, surprised at my general optimism. Teaching ethics to business majors*, it seems, can be discouraging.
As my colleague described it, the business majors seem to have a picture of the business world as a series of opportunities to savage, or be savaged by, one’s competitors (and while there are temporary alliances to gain advantage over others, in the end everyone is your competitor). Selling business majors on the idea of not doing things they can get away with, or of being virtuous when no one will notice it and reward it with a bonus, is Very Hard. Naive, non-business majors like me might think that being able to look at oneself in the mirror could be incentive enough not to prey on the weak, or cook the books, or whatever business people are tempted by nowadays. But business students explain, “What makes me feel good about myself is the size of my paycheck. That’s the good I should maximize.”
As sad as this conversation made me feel for my colleague, it made me feel very optimistic about the prospects of the community of science.
It doesn’t seem crazy to think that some people might go into business because the opportunity to screw others over in skillful ways thrills them. Hollywood movies would tend to bear this out (from Wall Street to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). Heck, it seems built into people’s assumptions about how free market capitalism is supposed to work. In some ways, the ethics that the folks in the philosophy department try to teach them seem like they’re pulling counter to the natural direction that all things flow in the world of business. They seem contrary to the nature of the enterprise.
Now, we know that business types are not the only ones who get caught doing unethical stuff. Anyone who’s been paying attention is aware that scientists get caught cheating, too. Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the prospects for rooting out such problems in the scientific community in a way I am not for the business community.
Science majors, at least in my experience, are not attracted to science as an arena in which to screw others over in skillful ways. Rather, they’re attracted to science because it offers a route to building new knowledge of the world. They are drawn to a way of looking at the world that provides understanding you just can’t get any other way. They enjoy the mental challenge of “puzzle-solving” (as Kuhn described it). They think it’s cool that scientific knowledge can help us solve real problems in the world, or build new stuff we couldn’t build before. In short, they’re attracted to science because the project of doing science is fun.
When one moves from being a science major to actually joining the community of science (in an industry or academic setting), the competitive aspects of the scientific life become more apparent. You want to make your discovery first. You want to get your grant funded. You want your paper to get some of those scarce pages in the high impact journal. You want to be the applicant (out of more than 100) who gets the tenure track job. You want to be the one whose productivity is so amazing that you get tenure.
Scarce resources, lots of competition. Suddenly, it doesn’t look so different from the world in which the business majors see themselves.
Except, the features that make screwing over other scientists look like a successful strategy (not to say an appealing one) are features of the institutional environments in which science is conducted. They are not features that are essential to the project of doing science itself. With some tweaking of these institutional environments (to increase the available resources and encourage cooperation, for example), the advantage in sinking a dagger into one’s fellow scientist would be greatly diminished.
Moreover, unlike the world of business, where one’s value might just come down to the size of the pile of money one has amassed, in science, succeeding is more than just winning more external rewards (grants, publications, tenure, patent rights) than your competitors. Success is measured by getting the world right in a certain kind of way. The pull-out-the-stops thrashing of your opponents by any means necessary (including plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification) takes you further from success in science, not closer to it. In other words, ethics (like being honest) are a natural part of the scientific endeavor — and scientists who remember what got them interested in science in the first place understand this.
So, at least at the outset (i.e., when I have them in class), science majors tend to regard ethics as A Good Thing, rather than as something imposed on them from the outside by people hostile to the enterprise.
The problem, of course, is that science majors who become grown-up scientists will be thrust into those institutional structures that seem to encourage cheating. What are the chances that they’ll be able to hold onto their ethics in this environment? Won’t they just fall prey to other scientists who aren’t burdened by the constraints of ethical qualms? Wouldn’t the best survival strategy be to just suck it up and “play the game” like everyone else?
I think this grim resignation — seeing oneself as a cork bobbing in the vast ocean of How Things Are — is an abdication of responsibility. Worse, it’s an agreement to give up the fun that got you into science in the first place. The community of science is imbedded in certain institutional structures, but it is also a community — made up of individual scientists. A community is not an unchanging environment against which the individual must fight for survival. Members of the community have a say in how that community operates. Individually, each member may have a very small say, but this is where communication with other members of the community comes in. You don’t like the way things are going? Chances are, others in the community feel the same way. Put your heads, and your voices, together to identify the problems and propose some ways to change them.
Allowing the fun to be sucked out of science because of “how things are” is too high a price to pay. It’s letting the business student’s model of reality win. To steal a phrase from Stephen Colbert, it is high time to unleash nerd fury against institutional features that reward being a jerk rather than doing good science.
And nerd fury, properly unleahed, is pretty powerful stuff. This is why I am optimistic about my students, and the future of the scientific community once they get their hands on it.
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*For the record, I’m not claiming all business students are unethical/amoral/evil. Some of my best, and most ethical, students have been business students.
“. They are not features that are essential to the project of doing science itself. ”
I don’t see how you could think that. In science, if you’re scooped your discovery and the hard labor that went to produce it is worth vastly less. You need those profits to buy your job as a working scientist, and those jobs are scarce relative to the number vying for them. Same deal for big media journalists, who are subject to similar kinds of corruption. I don’t see any qualitative difference between either of these cultures and that of “business” or biological competition for scarce resources generally. If one is more civil or behaving better lately, great, but it need not be so and could change. That’s one premise for ethics courses I suppose.
During my career in marketing, it was far more likely that everyone would someday be a customer than that they would be a competitor. While not exactly an ethics consideration, if I were teaching a business ethics class, I would start with this observation. The other thing your friend who teaches business ethics might want remind students of is that, unfortunately, throughout your life, with few exceptions, friends come and go; enemies last forever. Choose them carefully
I take it, though, that according supreme importance to priority claims is a feature of the conditions under which science is practiced — we could do science under conditions where who got to the knowledge first is much less important than the fact that the community got to the knowledge.
If the main things scientists worried about was getting the knowledge (if, in some sense, your main “competition” was the universe and its ability to keep its secrets), all sorts of bad behavior in which scientists currently engage to stay in the “business” just wouldn’t be rewarding anymore. And, I don’t think the project of science in any way hinges on conditions with scarce resources and fierce competition. Just because it’s that way now doesn’t mean it needs to be that way.
I’ll allow, though, that the project of transforming the current conditions to the ones I envision is … challenging.
Science is incentivized by prestige and reputation. I don’t see how to disconnect that from being first. It’s not creative if it isn’t first.
I copied this quote from a news article awhile back:
“The Nobel prize is a wonderful thing, and I thank all those who wished me well, but I don’t think that winning the Nobel prize is the peak of every scientist’s aspirations. The peak of every scientist’s aspirations is like the aspirations of every person � and that is the wish to influence.”
– Robert Aumann, co-winner of 2005 economics prize for his work in game theory.
It’s not creative if it isn’t first.
I think you mean, it’s not creative if it knowingly copies whatever was first. Two equally creative labs can come up with the same thing at nearly the same time — indeed, this is quite common. The current “winner takes all” idea that whoever publishes first, by however short a margin, gets the credit is idiotic and counter-productive. This “first past the post” crap should be first against the wall, come Dr Free-Ride’s co-operative revolution in open science.
I strongly agree with your arguement. It makes me think to the fact that you hear/talk about con-artists screwing people over, but rarely hear of that diabolical meteorologist who invests in raincoats and predicts a monsoon. While this isnt impossible, (think about doctors who take advantage of hypochondriacs and prolong medication so they can make more money) but i see a significant difference in the two social models. Another point of interest is that scientists and science in general builds off one another, unlike the buisness world which is a “doggie dog world.” I personally can only think of one buisness model which resembles the science community, network marketing. Everyone works togeather so that they all get paid, but if your outside the network you are shunned until your network is rich. Like science, where teams work togeather to get published or make a discovery and then they open up to others.
-Bryan
In writing “It’s not creative if it isn’t first” I was trying to be poetic at the expense of being clear. What I mean is that from the standpoint of news and history and the public discourse, generally we call and remember people as “creators” only if they did the thing first (or were the first to successfully make a lot of people aware of it). Being “original” carries a lot of cache, and even if you independly conceived and created something that’s been created before, you aren’t “original” in the nuanced popular usage of the word.
People who haven’t worked in science might not realize: Your average top-tier scientist could be hit by a bus and the advancement of human knowledge might be set back as little as two weeks. Others are always working on the same problem, and often with the same methods. Every sexy scientific question that looks approachable has a scrum or a huddle around it. How fast would science progess without this competitiveness, and what will make people compete if not the glory of being the first with an answer? If you’re just as happy to read about it from somebody else in Science or Nature, why strain yourself? In fact, why bother at all? Most experiments fail, creating a succession of disappointments. What’s more, you bring this misery on yourself. It’s the thought others will care that makes occasional experimental result rewarding. But they won’t care very much if they’ve heard it before.
(note: I’m “sennoma” above, it’s an old nick that I’m retiring but sometimes it’s autofilled and I forget)
MT: It’s the thought others will care that makes occasional experimental result rewarding
That’s not why I do research — at least, it’s far from the primary reason. I do research because it’s fun, and because I want the answers to the questions I’m working on. I don’t work harder because I want to beat someone to something, and I wouldn’t work less diligently if being “first” were less of a community obsession.
In a more open research community, priority would be less important because it would be clear who was doing what experiments, and co-operation would be a clearer alternative to competition: “OK, you will be able to do the mouse work faster than we will, so how about we do the in vitro modeling in parallel?”, that kind of thing. The obsession with being first assumes that there are not enough interesting questions to go around, so that it’s worth trying to beat someone to a particular answer by two weeks (thus relegating much of their work to “wasted effort”). I think that this is not true, that there are more than enough questions for everyone. The problem is in infrastructure and mindset: how do we let everyone know what everyone else is up to on a real-time basis, and how do we get people to switch from the “me me me me me” view to a collaborative approach?
There are two kinds of “currency” in the research community: ideas, and results. Ideas are buried in the current system, because too many people keep their ideas to themselves until they can generate results (“publish or perish”). Imagine if, instead of searching PubMed for papers, you also subscribed to a set of RSS feeds from related labs. In that system, ideas pop up all the time — and credit for having a good one is more or less automatic. It ceases to matter so much who does the experiment.
I think that’s a great point about the idea/result divide, and the RSS proposal is at least interesting to think about. I think it wouldn’t provide credit effectively. Already it’s hard for a scientist to keep up with all the articles in his or her field. To keep up with the volume of text that blogs would pump out would be impossible. Also many people are liable to have the same idea. I think of the articles in which you report results as the soap boxes from which you also announce and stake a claim to ideas. No results, no soap box, no credit, even if you had the idea. Without results playing that gate-keeping function, I think we’d have lots vying for the title of originator, and it would be hard and/or too tedious to be bothered to resolve who is right. Plus we’d want people to improve on the good ideas we blog-cast. Unlike the open-source development model of Linux, seemingly nobody would be running this show, so we could have versions of the idea multiplying. So to whom accrues the glory of the insight? And why fight the fight? Who would be our Microsoft? Or our Sputnik? I dunno. I’ll be mulling this awhile.
I work on a model that is not standard on questions that are unusual. Our lab is in frequent touch with the other 3-4 labs in the world that do similar stuff, send each other manuscripts before submission for pre-review, and have beer together at meetings.
I think that competitiveness is much more aggressive in the bandwagon areas, where there are thousands of people doing the same stuff. I myself prefer being the odd one out. That gives me luxury of time to think a lot and do a lot of work before publishing.
Once I publish, my paper is not lost in a sea of similar papers – it stands out, people know who I am even if they may make good-natured jokes about it (the “quail guy”). And of course, I inject novel ideas into the Discussion.
I think it’s less about bandwagons and more about sharing results or an idea for or experiment that your competitors (a.k.a. “colleagues”) could duplicate as soon as they got off the phone or got home from the meeting. If you’re doing quail and other people are looking to answer the same question in rats, they can’t devalue your results so much by scooping you. If you were mice and they were rats though, maybe they could…assuming some evolved physiological capacity like olfaction or whisker sensation. If you’re talking about an insight about a gene, they might not even need to be in the same phylum…and if you revealed 6 amino acids they could publish before you.
if you revealed 6 amino acids they could publish before you
Only if they were degenerate bottom-feeders. Seriously. That kind of behaviour should be the focus of much, much greater opprobrium within the community.
If coturnix tells me about a gene he’s found in quail, and I think it might be interesting in humans, I’ll say so — and we’ll talk about what experiments to do, and in which of our labs to do each one so as to get the work done as quickly and inexpensively as possible, and we’ll publish a paper together. If I find something I think might be interesting in quail, I’ll think “ah, coturnix is my man for this”, and we’ll collaborate again. No scooping required.
The greatest kudos in science attaches to elegant, creative ideas; any scientist who steals ideas is lamer than lame and lower than pondscum.
The lowest I actually know about from my own circle are things like using your influence to get a journal to hold back publication on your competitor’s paper so you can publish yours alongside it, or “sharing” the wrong reagents with a competing lab, or advancing your own claim either to an idea or to its validation without citing others with a vying claim.
MT: and are those not shunning offences? Would you work with someone who did such things?
It’s usually impossible to prove those sorts of misdeeds, so it’s no use saying the perps should be summarily dismissed. They certainly should, but it won’t happen. So I suggest that community mores should take over from rules, and that such behaviour should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
THE GREATEST GOOF IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Many have probably heard of the greatest discovery ever made in the behavioral science, i.e. the discovery of the honeybee “dance language” (abbreviated here as: DL), which was first published by K. von Frisch in a scientific journal, in 1946, and soon became a revered ruling paradigm. The discovery has been touted practically everywhere, in the professional scientific-media, as well as the the popular scientific media. It was taught as gospel to college students and high-school kids, and even to pre-kindergarten children. It earned v. Frisch numerous tokens of admiration, including honorary membership in scientific academies all over the world, The Magellanic Premium Prize, awarded by the American Philosophical Society (in 1955), The Kalinga UNESCO Prize (in 1958), a Balzan Prize, considered second in importance only to the Nobel Prize, (in 1962), and finally (in 1973), also the Nobel prize in Medicine or physiology (which v. Frisch shared with Konrad Lorenz & Niko Tinbergen, the two co-founders of the general approach to the study of behavior, known as European Ethology).
Nonetheless, the discovery of the honeybee DL is a “discovery” of something that never existed., and constitutes the greatest goof in the history of science, not for any one specific reason, but for the awesome weight of many different reasons combined; including the fact that the “discovery” helped Lorenz & Tinbergen share v. Frisch’s Nobel Prize. What v. Frisch claimed to have discovered, and experimentally confirmed, was the claim that honeybee-recruits use spatial information contained in foragers’-dances about the approximate site of the foragers’ food-source, to help them find the source. The claim initially met with disbelief, but several highly influential scientists became quickly converted, and sent the sensational claim on its quick way to becoming a revered ruling paradigm.
When v. Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973, this happened 6 years after Wenner & his team had already launched their fully justified critique of the DL hypothesis, based on experimental work, in the journal Science (in 1967); claiming that honeybee-recruits use odor alone all along. This led to a severe backlash that soon turned Wenner & his team into pariahs. You can find some information about it, and much more, in the book by Wenner & Wells (1990): ” Anatomy of a Controversy”, published by Columbia University Press. Eventually, it turned out, however, that when Wenner’s team discovered, and published in 1967, that honeybee-recruits use odor alone all along, they unknowingly re-discovered what v. Frisch himself had already discovered and published, on the basis of his own experimental results, at least as early as 1923, that honeybee-recruits use odor alone and no information about the location of any food; i.e. what v. Frisch had discovered some 50 years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his “discovery” that they use information contained in foragers’-dances about the location of the foragers’ food-source.
When honeybee-foragers are trained to a feeder with a scented sugar-solution far from the hive, they perform figure-eight waggle-dances, where the 2 curved haves of the figure are joined by a straight waggle-run, during which the foragers waggle their abdomens, vibrate their wings, and also emit a pulsed sound. The dancing foragers turn out of the waggle-run alternately to the right, and left. As the feeder is gradually brought closer to the hive, the foragers are less exhausted when they dance, and as a result they dance faster. This causes the curved portions of the dance to become longer, the waggle-run , to become shorter, with fewer waggles, and alternate waggle-runs to become separated by an angle; until finally the curved portion extends to more than a full circle, and the waggle-run is performed so quickly that the dancing foragers have no time to waggle at all. They then perform what are known as perfect round dances.
In v. Frisch’s first study on honeybee-recruitment , done with the local Austrian honeybee-strain (and published in an extensive summary in 1923), foragers were trained to a dish with a scented sugar-solution only 13-16 m. from the hive, and, thus, performed only round dances without a trace of a waggle. (In fact, at that time he did not even know they could at all perform waggle dances. He believed that round dances were performed for nectar, or its experimental substitute, i.e. a solution of sugar in water, while waggle dances were performed for pollen.) V. Frisch then distributed in the field other, very small, identical dishes with the same amount of the same scented sugar-solution, capturing and counting all new-arrivals. In some tests he deliberately placed dishes with a sugar-solution that had a different food-odor right next to dishes with the foragers’ food-odor, i.e. practically at the same site. In some tests he captured new-arrivals, individually marked them, and released them to verify that they indeed came from his experimental hive, and not from just any hive in the apiary. His recruits found all the dishes with the foragers’ food-odor, and none of the dishes with a different food-odor, up to a distance of 1,000 m. from the hive (the greatest distance then tested). Since they found, among others, also dishes to which the foragers were not flying, and could not have even known existed at all, he fully justifiably concluded that recruit find food with the foragers’ food-odor, not by following foragers in flight all the way from the hive to the food, nor by using any information about the location of any food, but by use of odor alone.
According to his DL hypothesis (first published in a scientific journal more than 20 years later), round dances cause recruits to find food only within the round dance range; which is not more than 100 m. from the hive for the Austrian honeybees. The experimental results v. Frisch had obtained in his first study on honeybee-recruitment, thus, grossly contradicted his DL hypothesis long before its inception, and the DL hypothesis was, therefore, very clearly and obviously stillborn.
An inadvertent test carried out by a colleague of his in 1943, during the extremely turbulent period of WWII, led v. Frisch to conclude that his initial conclusion that recruits use odor alone all along, must have been an error, (which it never was), and gradually replace it with his sensational DL hypothesis (published shortly after the War). It is very interesting and important to understand how, and why that happened. We now know that what tripped v. Frisch was primarily his very early erroneous conclusion (of 1919), based on his own experimental results, that honeybees had a very poor, human-like sensitivity to odors. (V. Frisch made that error at a time when it was only too easy to make, and before he even turned to study honeybee-recruitment.) The details of his first study on honeybee-recruitment showed that the closer a dish with the foragers’ food-odor was to the hive, the earlier it was found by recruits, and the greater the number of new-arrivals it received.
V. Frish, therefore, had to explain how recruits, with their presumably very poor sensitivity to odors, searched for attractive odors, to produce the details of the results he had obtained. His result meant to him that the closer a dish was to the hive, the earlier recruits had to get close enough to the dish, so that they could sense the odors from the dish. And this left v. Frisch no choice but to assume that the way recruits searched for attractive odors was, by conducting a circular-search that gradually expanded around the hive, and extended (when necessary), to the limits of the foraging area of the colony. This assumption regarding how recruits use odor alone all along, led him to expect basically the same results in all future tests, i.e. that the closer a dish was to the hive, the earlier it would be found by recruits, and the greater number of new-arrivals it would receive. The case was closed, and it remained closed for another 20 years; until 1943.
V. Frish tells all about what happened in 1943 in his definitive book on the honeybee DL:”The Dance language and Orientation of Bees” (1967), translated from the original German edition of 1965 , and published by Harvard University Press. A colleague of his trained foragers to a dish with a scented sugar-solution 500 m. from the hive. She then wanted to have another foragers’-dish very close to the hive. V. Frisch does not explain what she intended to test, but he gave her what he thought was a very good piece of advice. In order to save herself the chore of training foragers to such a dish, he asdvised her to set the dish near the hive, fill it with the same scented sugar-solution she was using at the 500 m. site, and let the bees do her work for her. He expected that new recruits would now first find the dish near the hive. Instead, recruits continued to arrive at the 500 m. site. To v. Frisch this meant that his initial conclusion that recruits used odor alone all along must have been in error, and that in addition to odors they must have used something else, which enables them to know where to go. An examination of the dances of the foragers from the 500 m. dish revealed that they were performing waggle-dances, instead of the round dances he expected them to perform; which meant that the type of dance did not depend on the type of food, but on the distance of the food from the hive. This, soon led to the discovery of the distance and direction information contained in foragers’-dances; which seemed to v. Frisch to provide that which recruits were using in addition to odors. They were apparently using the spatial information contained in the dances, and then (when necessary), supplementing that by searching for attractive odors only within a relatively short range around the point reached by use of the spatial information alone.
And the rest is history! The stillborn DL hypothesis gradually rose all the way to the status of a presumably fully properly experimentally confirmed hypothesis, and win the Nobel Prize. Today we know, however, that the only reason v. Frisch’s expectations from use of odor alone all along failed in that inadvertent 1943 test (as well as in other similar tests), was not at all due to any error in his initial 1923 conclusion regarding what honeybee-recruits use, but only due to his erroneous expectations from use of odor alone all along; which were based on his erroneous conclusion regarding how recruits use odor alone all along; which was, in turn, based on his error regarding the sensitivity of honeybees to odors.
Wenner & his team had to re-discover on their own that recruits use odor alone all along, because they could not have known of v. Frisch’s first study on honeybee-recruitment. After the inception of his DL hypothesis v. Frisch phased out the results he had obtained in that study. He never repeated the tests done in that study. Instead, he carried out 2 new tests with round dances, using a drastically different number and arrangement of small dishes with the foragers’ food-odor, than he used in his first study on honeybee-recruitment. This time, recruits found all the dishes within 100 m. of the hive, and none of the dishes that were available outside that range, just as was expected according to his DL hypothesis. (He could not have known he was doing anything wrong, because the number, and geometric arrangement of the dishes is expected to have a major effect on use of odor alone all along, but only provided honeybees have an exceptionally high sensitivity to odors; a possibility that did not exist for v. Frisch.) In his 1967 (1965) book he did not provide the results he had obtained in his first study on honeybee-recruitment. Instead, he provided the results of those 2 new-tests with round dances (actually done in 1962). And since he repeatedly claimed to have experimentally confirmed his DL hypothesis, DL opponents naturally examined only his evidence for that claim, and did not bother to check any of his earlier publications, where such evidence could not have been found. Little did we know what we could find there!
Eventually I accidentally stumbled on a short article by v. Frisch, published in 1939, in the Annual report of the Smithsonian Institution in the US. The publication was a reprint of a 1937 publication, based on a guest-lecture v. Frisch had delivered at the University College of London in 1937, summarizing his whole earlier honeybee-research; including his first study on honeybee-recruitment, and his fully justified conclusion, based on that study, that recruits use odor alone, and no information about the location of any food. I published the find in J. theoret. Biol., 84: 775-800 (1980), but no one except the handful of DL opponents paid attention.
V. Frisch’s error regarding the sensitivity of honeybees to odors was discovered by the British honeybee-researcher, Ribbands, and is presented in his book: “The Behaviour and Social Life of Honeybees”,published by IBRA (the International Bee Research Association, in 1953. . In his 1967 (1965) book, v. Frisch did his best to discredit Ribbands, and brought up the results of 3 new studies on the sensitivity of honeybees to odors, each done by a single researcher, using a different technique, all vindicating v. Frisch vs. Ribbands, and all , interestingly done by researchers who were directly, or indirectly associated with v. Frisch. So great was v. Frisch’s prestige, that Wenner had to inadvertently also re-discover on his own, and publish in 1971, what Ribbands had already discovered and published in 1953, i.e. that, contrary to v. Frisch, honeybees had an exceptionally high sensitivity to odors. This is today fully established to the point that scientists are working on ways to train honeybees to sniff explosives in mine-fields.
Ribbands, however, either could not see how v. Frisch’s error regarding the sensitivity of honeybees to odors tripped him and misled him into his DL hypothesis. Or else, Ribbands might have been influenced by another faulty argument for the DL hypothesis, often raised by DL supporters, starting with v. Frisch himself. V. Frisch discovered that honeybee-dances are not learned, which led to the erroneous conclusion that they must be “instinctive”, i.e. genetically predetermined. As such, they had to be adaptive, as one whole behavior; all the more so since they involve the expenditure of a considerable amount of time & energy on the part of both dancer & dance-attendants. There is, however, no conceivable adaptive value for honeybee dances as one whole behavior, except to serve in a DL that utilizes the spatial information contained in the dances. The honeybee DL, therefore, simply had to exist! The assumption that honeybee dances constitute one whole, genetically predetermined behavior is, however, unwarranted. instead, the dances apparently comprise many different component-responses, some learned, and some not learned. At any rate, Ribbands remained a faithful believer in the existence of the honeybee DL.
V. Frisch correctly took it for granted that his sensational DL hypothesis could not, and should not be accepted without a proper experimental confirmation. He believed, however, that he had repeatedly provided such a confirmation; which he actually never achieved. Attempts to experimentally confirm the DL hypothesis have been going on ever since v. Frisch published the hypothesis in 1946, i.e. for almost 60 years; by now at the expense of a considerable amount of time & talent, and the expense of millions of dollars of good research-funds. Every few years DL supporters publish a new claim of having finally achieved the required experimental confirmation. The scientific publications of such claims is often accompanied by considerable hype in the popular scientific-media. Nonetheless, none of those claims have ever passed the rigorous scrutiny given them by DL opponents. And this includes even the latest such claim, publicised on the Internet for at least a year and a half prior to publication, then, finally published in the journal Nature on May 12 (2005), and immediately touted everywhere, starting with the BBC. DL opponents can always detect serious, and sometimes even utterly incredible errors, in such publications.
The failure of DL supporters, for almost 60 years, to achieve the required experimental confirmation of the DL hypothesis, is not surprising at all. It is impossible to revive a DL hypothesis that was so clearly stillborn more than 80 years ago, thanks to v. Frisch’s first study on honeybee-recruitment.!
Warning signs against the DL hypothesis kept continually cropping up, in the form of “anomalous” results, in the experiments done by DL supporters themselves, starting with v. Frisch. The way v. Frisch handled such “anomalies” was by introducing never experimentally confirmed, or even tested, ad hoc revisions, i.e. auxiliary hypotheses that made it possible to incorporate the “anomalous” results within the now revised version of the DL hypothesis. Other DL supporters followed v. Frisch’s example. Except that eventually they were obliged to introduce so many auxiliary hypothesis, that they, inevitably, ended up contradicting one another, and sometimes even themselves (since they failed to carefully fully examine all the implications of each, and every auxiliary hypothesis). As a result, by now no one even knows anymore what the DL hypothesis really stands for, beyond the core-claim that somewhere, somehow, some honeybees, use the spatial information contained in foragers’-dances. A hypothesis that can not predict anything more definite than that, cannot be tested, and, does not, therefore, qualify as a scientific hypothesis at all.
Now, scientists can go to a hive, observe a dancing forager, and determine approximately at which distance & direction the forager had foraged. However, the only way scientists can do that is, by relying on a detailed preliminary research on the relations between various aspects of the dances, and the distance & direction of the foragers’-food; which must be done separately for each honeybee species, and strain. Honeybees obviously do not engage in any scientific research. So, how can they obtain the spatial information contained in the dances? Well, DL supporters have always assumed that the bees do it all “instinctively”, i. e. with the aid of some genetically predetermined, computer-like mechanism in the brain, that does it for them. European Ethology is based on the misguided belief in the existence of genetically predetermined “instincts”. This is how the erroneous belief by the 1973 Nobel Committee, that the existence of the honeybee DL had already been properly experimentally confirmed, provided European Ethology with its most impressive validation. Genes predetermine a whole range of potential individual development, as well as what is outside that range. They do not, however, alone, predetermine what will actually materialize in individual development. This is determined, instead, by inseparable effects of both genes & environment. Just consider a onc-celled fertilized egg (which is how most individual lives begin). It is always possible to apply environmental conditions that would snuff an individual life at that very early, initial stage. Obviously, it is not genetically predetermined that an individual life should develop into anytghing beyond that very early, initial stage.
There is obviously much more to be said about the honeybee DL controversy that has been going on for close to 40 years, and constitutes the most important reflection of a general, basic controversy over the very foundations of the whole field of Behavioral Science, which has been going on since the mid-30’s of last century. But I shall say no more here.
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Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin (“Prickly pear”)
They ought to be shunning offences, but it’s hard for the littler fish to shun the bigger one. People complain behind each others’ backs though. Failure to cite is easy to prove in a sense, but as you can’t cite everybody, there’s discretion and subjectivity to citing–and just as importantly there’s subjectivity in the perception of a slight or a wrong having been committed when a cite is omitted or represented to stand for something narrower or less or different than you think it stands. I think with the choice of citations people are each trying to shape how the text books and hence history will read, once written. So I think it’s partly inseparable from how the thinking of the community evolves. I suspect the scientific consensus you reach in the end is rarely a consensus about how you got there, which as Kuhn and others have described, can be complicated.
In case anyone else is curious: a quick google for Ruth Rosin’s name turned up a prior discussion about the bee dance stuff here (scroll/search for “dance”), and there’s a free review by Eileen Crist available here. A PubMed search reveals that Dr Rosin has had a (you should excuse the expression) bee in her bonnet about this since at least 1978, when she published on it in the J. Theor. Biol. Another PubMed search indicates that Dr Rosin’s view is very much in the minority.
Jane Jacobs’ “Systems of Survival” presents an altogether different model on the underlying ethics of business. I reviewed her work on my blog and have recommended it to my peers in the soil science consulting community. Jacobs’ holds that the honesty and trust needed to conduct science is built on an ethical foundation originally developed and uniquely nurtured from within the business environment. In my experience, this is a solid fact. I have built my 30 year business career on fairness, honesty and concern for my clients and my community, and so have the business people I associate with. Students, who have never had to survive in a business setting are a poor population on which to base conclusions as to business ethics. Shame on academia for nurturing this self-congratulating mythology. Read Jane now.