The Bee Battles: Karl von Frisch,Adrian Wenner and the Honey Bee Dance Language Controversy |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">Tania?MunzEmail author |
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Institution: | (1) History of Science, Princeton University, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA |
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Abstract: | In 1967, American biologist Adrian Wenner (1928–) launched an extensive challenge to Karl von Frisch’s (1886–1982) theory
that bees communicate to each other the direction and distance of food sources by a symbolic dance language. Wenner and various
collaborators argued that bees locate foods solely by odors. Although the dispute had largely run its course by 1973 – von
Frisch was awarded a Nobel Prize, while Wenner withdrew from active bee research – it offers us a rare window into mid-twentieth
century discussions about animals, language, and cognition. Historians, sociologists, and scientists have commented on the
debate and its outcome, but none has seriously questioned why von Frisch and Wenner pursued such different explanations of
the bees’ dances. In this paper, I explore von Frisch and Wenner’s differing visions of animals and their behaviors and show
how these contributed to their respective positions. Von Frisch’s early-twentieth-century training in experimental physiology
disposed him to focus on individual animals, their abilities, and their behaviors’ evolutionary significance. Wenner, by contrast,
was trained in mathematics and statistics and the Schneirla school of behavior. He viewed the bees’ behaviors probabilistically
with an eye toward the entire hive and its surroundings and ultimately explained them in terms of simple stimulus–response
conditioning. Finally, while the debate was resolved in von Frisch’s favor, he neither waged nor won the battle by himself.
Instead, I show that practitioners, whose agendas ranged from the nascent fields of sociobiology to cognitive ethology, took
up the cause of the communicating bees.
Winner of the 2005 International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology Marjorie Grene Graduate
Student Essay Prize. |
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Keywords: | Adrian Wenner animal behavior animal communication animal consciousness animal mind honeybee dance language Karl von Frisch |
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