slime mold decisions: begins to study loners (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 24, 2020, 15:52 (1642 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The mental connections you want require the bees to put different observations at different times into a clearly thought out new concept: bite leaves and pollen will come. It requires a human level of thought. Bee level is not that. (David's bold)

dhw: Nobody is claiming that bees have a human level of thought, but they observe, remember, communicate and cooperate. Once a discovery has been made, it will be passed on. Out of interest, which of your two methods of “help” do you think more likely: God programmed leaf-biting 3.8 billion years ago, or he stepped in to teach a few lucky bees how to do it?

DAVID: Do you really think that bees which do all the simple mental gymnastics you describe can get to the contemplative level in the bold? You skipped over the point.

dhw: What on earth is “contemplative” about this process?
QUOTE: worker bumblebees can make plants flower earlier than normal by using their mouthparts to pierce small holes in leaves.
"In a series of laboratory and outdoor experiments, the researchers found that bumblebees were more likely to pierce holes in the leaves of tomato plants and black mustard plants when deprived of food. The leaf damage caused the tomato plants to flower 30 days earlier than usual and the black mustard plants to flower 16 days earlier.”

dhw: Nobody knows the origin of such “natural wonders”, but biting a leaf, noticing and then remembering that 16-30 days later the plant flowers, does not require contemplation! It requires observing what happened, remembering what happened, and passing on the information to other bees, who will then perform the same trick. There is no “clearly thought out concept” or contemplation! Now please tell us whether you think your God preprogrammed the trick 3.8 billion years ago or “stepped in” to teach bees a lesson in leaf-biting.

What you have carefully left out is the reasoning involved: bees: "we bit leaves almost a month ago and now there are flowers that weren't there before. Did one cause the other?" What you are ignoring, as a superior human, is the integrative thinking involved. 'What is it like to be a bee?' Nagelizing it shows what you miss. Only repeated biting under the same circumstances would prove it to the bees and probably to us after first time around. God may well have helped.