slime mold decisions: begins to study loners (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 26, 2020, 20:23 (1640 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Now you are complaining that my bee doesn’t think like a human being! Of course it doesn’t. I do not for one second believe that a bee would say to itself: “Did one cause the other?” It would observe, remember and communicate.

David: You have still avoided the issue of a chance happening of 'bite leaves and then flowers'. Bees don't automatically bite leaves, which makes this so unusual. To solidify the issue it requires multiple repeated attempts with the same result for both bees and humans to remove the possibility of a chance reaction. For both it DOES NOT require our level of thought!!! Yours is an entirely superficial analysis to advance your agenda of downgrading the human intelligence difference from animals.

dhw: I asked you for your explanation of this particular case: did your God programme it 3.8 billion years ago, or did he give the bees a lesson in leaf-biting? Why don’t you give me a direct answer? “Directed mutations of the genome” does not explain how bees learned the leaf-biting trick! If you have no idea how God might have “helped” the bees to learn it, and you discount preprogramming and lecturing, you are left with bee intelligence. Not human intelligence, but bee intelligence.

David: Not knowing exactly how the bees figured it out with God's help doesn't remove the point I made above. Obviously, God might have manipulated the genome so bees had a new instinct. I really doubt He appeared and gave lessons. Why didn't you accept that genomic point when I made it yesterday? To advance bee intelligence! Same old tired agenda.

Single observations prove nothing and you know that full-well. As example, below is a study that requires many observations:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/star-black-hole-high-energy-neutrino

"With no electric charge and very little mass, neutrinos are known to blast across the cosmos at high energies. But scientists have yet to fully track down how the particles get so juiced up.

"Spotted on October 1, 2019, the little neutrino packed a punch: an energy of 200 trillion electron volts. That’s about 30 times the energy of the protons in the most powerful human-made particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. The neutrino’s signature was picked up by IceCube, a detector frozen deep in the Antarctic ice. That detector senses light produced when neutrinos interact with the ice.

***

"Determining where these particles come from can help scientists better understand some of the most extreme environments in the cosmos. Previously, astronomers had matched up a different energetic neutrino with a blazar experiencing a flare-up (SN:7/12/18). A blazar is a bright source of light powered by a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Both a blazar flare and a tidal disruption event “are very special activities, which is when a lot of energy is released in a small amount of time,” says astrophysicist Ke Fang of Stanford University, who was not involved with the study.

"Making more observations of high-energy neutrinos is crucial, Fang says. “This is the only way we can clearly understand how the universe is operating at this extreme energy.'”

Comment: We still don't understand a lot of why the universe works as it does.
This shows that chance events warrant repeated observation to be understood. The bee problem is no different.