Nice, it just goes to show how intelligent they are.
There are so many cool things about bees.
In the paper "Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees" they mention how bees can detect if other bees have harvested pollen from flowers, based on an electric field.
Along with the waggle dance, their functioning in a colony.
Also seen on Ars, it seems that bees when searching for consensus on big decisions will try to quiet dissenters by head-butting them. Enough head butts cause an individual to stop dancing for a while. This allows the remaining dancing scouts to come to a single, unanimous decision. - https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/12/bees-reach-consensus...
What's amazing is that honeybees will almost always choose the best option for a new home within an area where options are explored. They do this because scouts individually analyze an option before signaling their approval through a dance. In other words, they don't just take the word of another bee, they confirm and each "voter" is highly-informed. The idea painted in this article I believe is more for helping to resolve deadlocks when there are more than one high-quality choice. There are lessons even we can take away from the democratic process honeybees use to choose a new home.
I genuinely can't tell if this is meant metaphorically or literally. Assuming the former, lying suggests a level of consciousness that I don't expect bees to have.
Though it depends whether it is intentionally a lie. If a bee suffers some memory loss or otger failure of cognition causing them to think their position was better / worse it isn't intentional.
I think the definition of a "lie" implies intention. If one says something that is not true which they genuinely believe to be true, that is a "mistake" rather than a "lie".
So the scenario you are describing sounds totally plausible, but I would phrase it as the bee making a mistake rather than lying. =)
It's not even necessarily a mistake. If one bee values proximity to apple trees higher than proximity to peach trees and another bee values the opposite, then they can have honest and valid differences of opinion about two nesting sites.
Now we are confusing tge subject. The semantics of the words lie and mistake are a distraction.
> Some bees lie about what they've scouted though
I am highly doubtful that the source of this information was able to distinguish between a liar and a bee that made a mistake. Which is my original point with the semantics problem addressed.
When "even" bees are intelligent enough to teach each other skills, i really marvel at the mental gymnastics/machinery that goes into convincing oneself that humans are somehow a class apart from animals, and it's totally okay to eat them after having kept them pent up in atrocious conditions. Makes mental note to be a better vegetarian
(and FWIW: i'm not being morally superior here: i believe that in reality, probably being vegan is the only morally defensible position, but the flesh being weak and all... And in actual fact, probably even that is a tricky position: by surviving one is probably making the calculated decision (conscious or not) to put one's own survival above the cost of some other's demise.)
Either that -- or our perception of morality is wrong.
Maybe it's okay to eat animals as long as we treat them well. After all if they live a long happy and decently full life that's what really counts right?
We've really lost touch with our empathy for other creatures
In the old days people would respect the animal, hug it after killing it... on some level I think animals understand that their own death is a part of life.
Being humanely slaughtered is close to the best way for any living creature to go out - far better than dying of horrible diseases, infections, being mauled to death and partly eaten alive by a predator, slowly starving or dying of thirst.
Our perception of morality is shaped purely to benefit us as cooperative social K-selected mammals. It doesn't have any real significance beyond how it makes us feel.
If someone lets you live a happy life then hunts you down and kills you to eat, is that OK with you ?
If it's ok for you to rule on the life of a pig, say, then why isn't it ok for another human to decide on your life ?
(I really don't agree with this position - just playing devil's advocate)
If someone lets you live a happy life then hunts you down and kills you to eat, is that OK with you
Yes, definitely. If the alternative was that I didn't exist at all- most pigs wouldn't be around if we didn't eat them (https://xkcd.com/1338/).
The way I ethically decide whether it's ok to eat meat is whether, if that animal could express a choice, it would likely choose to exist and then be eaten or not exist at all. If an animal is kept in so much pain that it would rather not exist, then I think that's unethical. But if it would still choose to exist, then it's better than nothing- don't forget that living in the wild is generally a pretty harsh life as well.
I get what your saying. I think you've set a really low bar for how you decided wether something is good or bad though.
For me something doesn't become ethical when an animal can just about tolerate bad conditions.
I cant give you a hard line for where I decide, but it's not that.
What about if an animal can have some positive experiences of a wild animal (some space) with fewer of the negatives (very painful death). We have given them a better alternative arguably.
There really isn't a "good" or "bad" ... there is only "nature" ... and it's a beautiful hierarchical food-chain that should be appreciated and understood by all elements within it. Humans are one of the few that have the capacity to fully understand it. Sadly they still do not recognize the inherently hierarchical nature of even human society and this leads both the people at the bottom and top to hate each other.
Humans are the only creatures that have somehow attached themselves to this strange idea that controlling their pleasure and pain response (rather than their freedom) is the most important thing in the world.
Society and civilization should exist but only to protected freedom-- that doesn't mean that everyone should or can be happy. But rather freedom to compete and continue the threads of nature is what is important. Nature above all else.
It's not about what options they have. They are already here and they do not want to not exist nor be treated badly, they want to live a happy life. It's us who deny them this because we prioritize our convenience over their life and suffering.
If you applied the same thinking to slavery many people would be outraged.
They are already here and they do not want to not exist nor be treated badly
They are only here because we eat them. Look at the link I gave- nearly every mammal (counted by total weight) that is alive on earth is so because it has some use to us (https://xkcd.com/1338/). If we stopped eating them, the vast, vast majority of them wouldn't be alive. Economics demands it. Nobody is going to use land to raise herds of cattle and just let them exist. So you have to make a choice between either the animal not existing, or us eating it.
If you applied the same thinking to slavery many people would be outraged.
But in that case, the people who were slaves could have paid their own way and been useful to society outside of being slaves. Cattle can't do anything else useful. Either we eat them or they're not around. We can be kinder to them, but we can't (within any reasonable interpretation of the modern capitalist society we find ourselves in) just not eat them and have the same number around. They have no other function.
Plants and viruses are also pretty smart. At least, I don't see a fine line anywhere between the simplest living organism to the most intelligent.
But you have to eat other organisms to survive. It's kind of like delegation of work - they do the initial processing of resources and then become part of you.
Things can't be immoral if they are mandatory for survival - that means your morals are wrong.
One needs to kill much less plants if one avoids anymal products. Cows, pigs, dogs etc. are very inefficient at converting plants they consume into flesh that can be eaten.
I was referring to "Plants and viruses are also pretty smart." that implied that killing plants is not OK.
Clearly humans have to kill living creatures to survive, but a moral problem only raises when one has a choice. And we do have a choice between eating, say, a ton of grains or feeding a cow 10 tonn of grass and then killing the cow.
> i really marvel at the mental gymnastics/machinery that goes into convincing oneself that humans are somehow a class apart from animals
One can even characterize the history of science as a timeline of refuting humanity's exceptionalism starting with Copernicus's technical and metaphorical discovery that we are not the center of the universe.
Lately, I've been wrestling with the issue and come to the conclusion that consciousness is either something that all life possesses or simply does not exist.
> One can even characterize the history of science as a timeline of refuting humanity's exceptionalism starting with Galileo's technical and metaphorical discovery that we are not the center of the universe.
Nonsense!
The history of science is one of the things that makes humanity exceptional on Earth.
As for the rest of the universe... The search for life is telling us that life may be abundant throughout the universe, but that animal life and intelligent life may be rare or even unique to Earth. Our solar system is a freak compared to what we've found out there so far: Our star isn't a red dwarf. Our solar system is arranged with gas giants as outer planets and small terrestrial planets as inner planets, and has exactly zero super-Earths. Our planet has an incredibly large satellite. We live inhabit a relatively peaceful, but still resourceful part of our galaxy. We're alive relatively early in the history of the universe in terms of the materials for life being available, and a huge amount of the universe still being in information contact with us...
> Lately, I've been wrestling with the issue and come to the conclusion that consciousness is either something that all life possesses or simply does not exist.
How can one come to the conclusion that consciousness does not exist? "I think, therefore I do not think."
My own personal view is that consciousness is either an emergent property of the brain, in which case only brained organisms could even hope to have consciousness, and depending on which part of the brain, not even all brained organisms might be conscious; or a fundamental property of the universe which the brain has evolved to take advantage of because it provides a selective advantage, in which case again, not all organisms will have consciousness.
It isn't clear to me why the distinction between conscious and unconscious would be between living and non-living. Why would an amoeba have consciousness and a volcano not have consciousness? I'd be willing to accept they BOTH have consciousness before I would be willing to accept only one of them does. The former implies something fundamental, the latter implies arbitrary distinctions among chemistries.
But consciousness, in my experience, at least, seems linked in some way to the state of my brain. If I am knocked out, my consciousness stops. In a sense, it disappears. By what mechanism does it get saved and reappear? My memory saves it, my brain restarts it when I wake up. If I sleep, I might dream, in which case my consciousness is altered as is my brain state. Consciousness seems localized in my brain, aware only of the things my brain can be aware of through the senses.
> but that animal life and intelligent life may be rare or even unique to Earth. Our solar system is a freak compared to what we've found out there so far:
This is the type of magical thinking that the parent OP is referencing, vastly exaggerating ourselves or aspects of ourselves to make us exceptional. Let's first set foot on another planet before even considering our universal supremacy. All we have our relatively uninformed ideas and hypotheses about what life would be on another planet.
Our solar system is not a freak. Some 15% of star systems in the Milky Way are similar to ours with gas giants for away. It's not a majority, but not rare either. Oh yeah, multiply that by 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe (btw, the unobservable universe is 10^30 the size of our own.
We're only looking for life like ours because that's all that we can realistically perceive, not because that's all that is possible.
> We're alive relatively early in the history of the universe in terms of the materials for life being available, and a huge amount of the universe still being in information contact with us...
Once again, you're employing exceptionalism and assuming that life has to resemble us and communicates in ways that we understand.
There's so many holes in the Fermi Paradox that you can drive a big rig through it. A relatively simple one is that (let's assume other lifeforms are territorial) Earth is part of some alien empire and is off limits. Another simple one is that we have been contacted but humanity isn't ready. Considering what the current response to globalization (retrenchment and reinforcement of national identity), an intelligent alien civilization could come to the conclusion that introducing themselves would make matters worse.
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us
- Eminent tiger philosopher Hobbes
> This is the type of magical thinking that the parent OP is referencing, vastly exaggerating ourselves or aspects of ourselves to make us exceptional.
On the contrary, this is very sobering thinking that you and the OP have tried to turn into magical thinking by adding all kinds of value judgments to it like "exceptionalism" and "supremacy". I'm not objecting to the political view, although I find it bleak, nihilistic, and shallow. I'm objecting to your nonsensical justifications of it. I was also trying to continue your talk on consciousness because I find it interesting.
> Our solar system is not a freak. Some 15% of star systems in the Milky Way are similar to ours with gas giants for away. It's not a majority, but not rare either. Oh yeah, multiply that by 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe
This is simply wrong. The sun is a single, middle-aged, population I, G-type star with a configuration of planets that is unlike any other configuration of planets we've found so far. There's more that makes our system, and Earth in particular, unique, they're all fractions, and they all get multiplied together; and we're not as ignorant about those fractions as you'd like to argue.
> (btw, the unobservable universe is 10^30 the size of our own.
This is both theoretical and irrelevant. We can never interact with it, so even if it is teeming with life, we could still be alone.
> Once again, you're employing exceptionalism and assuming that life has to resemble us and communicates in ways that we understand.
No, I'm not. I'm describing ways that make us unique. You're saying it's not that we are unique, it's just that there's nothing else like us out there so we don't know how to look for it...
> A relatively simple one is that (let's assume other lifeforms are territorial) Earth is part of some alien empire and is off limits. Another simple one is that we have been contacted but humanity isn't ready. Considering what the current response to globalization (retrenchment and reinforcement of national identity), an intelligent alien civilization could come to the conclusion that introducing themselves would make matters worse.
This argument is tangential to the discussion. But you understand that both these scenarios have been considered and some scientists have looked for evidence of them, right? Dyson spheres are relatively easy to spot and haven't been found. Evidence of engineering on a galactic scale is easy to find if it exists. And before you say, "What if it looks like natural processes because it's so ubiquitous?" scientists have looked for evidence of that too, specifically with older elliptical galaxies to my knowledge, but probably in other places.
And yes, there are other possibilities (civilizations scale down, rather than up, for instance) and we're continuing to look, but let's see evidence first. So far, the evidence says that we're probably rare. While you seem to think it is a bad thing to think or a justification for all kinds of bad thoughts, I think it means we have an obligation to both preserve the Earth and to get ourselves off of it to preserve ourselves.
do we know which other animals have chosen to be vegetarian ? Apparently squirrels are usually vegetarian but they'll eat meat if their survival depends on it
Though I don't necessarily agree with your parent, it's a valid point of view, and does not require the speaker to be vegetarian or not themselves. The argument reminds me a little of the religious morality argument that only humans are capable of allowing God into their life.
Again, I am not making either such claim, just rejecting your negative reply.
"I believe that in reality, probably being vegan is the only morally defensible position"
I don't see much morally wrong with eating an animal that died from old age that one finds in the field
Also, thinking of microorganisms, being vegan is impossible. There always are things on the stuff that you eat that could be classified as being animals.
Seems like a medium-term problem. If we cannot manage lab-grown meat within a few generations, enough went wrong that such questions are functionally meaningless.
The researchers recorded the following transcript, translated from bees' dance, a few months after introducing git to the colony:
"No you stupid wasp, how many times have I told you, YOU DO NOT REBASE A SHARED BRANCH. Never, ever, ever. If I see you do that again I swear to God I am telling the queen."
Hobbyist beekeeper, here. One of the most fascinating things about bee communication (IMHO) is not necessarily the two distinct types of dances they do, or not the precision on the distance and the direction of the target, but doing all that in the pitch darkness of their hive.
That got me interested and lead me to this but of Wikipedia which claims they perceive the dance by detecting vibrations and electric field changes:
Dancing honeybees (Apis mellifera) describe the location of nearby food sources by emitted airborne sound signals. These signals consist of rhythmic high-velocity movement of air particles. These near field sounds are received and interpreted using the Johnston’s organ in the pedicel of the antennae.[10] Honeybees also perceive electric field changes via the Johnston's organs in their antennae and possibly other mechano-receptors. Electric fields generated by movements of the wings cause displacements of the antennae based on Coulomb’s law. Neurons of the Johnston’s organ respond to movements within the range of displacements caused by electric fields. When the antennae were prevented from moving at the joints containing the Johnston’s organ, bees no longer responded to biologically relevant electric fields. Honeybees respond differently to different temporal patterns. Honeybees appear to use the electric field emanating from the dancing bee for distance communication.
There are many advantages in training animals to perform tasks rather than building machines to do them.
Animals are far more intelligent than current machines, more robust, well adapted to our environment, don't polute, require few/zero raw materials (with the associated environmental costs), have low/zero production costs, etc.
I would much prefer to live in an environment of plants and animals than one of concrete and metal.
The bottleneck is in the training, and this is where technology could play a part. Robotics and machine learning algorithms could be employed to improve the training process (for example see here: http://thecrowbox.com/).
Once you conscript animals into human society they do require tremendous resources and they do pollute. You can look at animal agriculture for an extreme example. It's easy to forget that animals are very inefficient resources because they use most of their input to simply survive, rather than "produce."
Imagine a bunch of different animals all working together to actually run the farm :-)
More seriously though your observation arises from speed and density, not activity. Consider chickens for example, which if you have a couple dozen chickens using a hectare (~2.5 acres) to live on their feeding and feces are completely supported in the existing cycles of that land (presuming non-desert, non-arctic). What gets it out of control is when you want 2000 hens laying in a single building on less than an acre. High density, imported feed, waste disposal becomes and issue, etc.
Indeed. I have read that keeping a medium sized dog (as a pet or working dog) is approximately as carbon intensive as driving a large car / 4 wheel drive.
I suppose dogs could be vegetarian, I have heard of people doing that, and they are natural omnivores, but generally speaking most people feed their dogs a carbon intensive (animal rich) diet.
Fascinating. I never considered the carbon footprint of companion animals. I'm sure that cats are more harmful per mass unit than dogs, being obligate carnivores.
Animal food ultimately comes from plants though, so the net increase in carbon to the atmosphere is zero, and their by-products are not so harmful. Machines rely on electricity which is mostly generated from non-renewable resources, and the production of steel and other raw materials requires a lot of energy and harmful waste.
Also consider that biological brains are several orders of magnitude more efficient than electronic ones.
Also, we don't necessarily need to breed more animals to perform useful tasks. We can just train existing populations (e.g. birds and bees) to behave in ways that are mutually beneficial to them and us.
There are so many cool things about bees.
In the paper "Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees" they mention how bees can detect if other bees have harvested pollen from flowers, based on an electric field.
Along with the waggle dance, their functioning in a colony.
Apparently they might let out a little vibration to express surprise when another bee bumps into them https://www.newscientist.com/article/2121275-honeybees-let-o...
Also they can apparently sense the earth's magnetic field - http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~jkirschvink/pdfs/Bees.pdf