AMANDA REPORTS: Where Do Bees Get Their Smarts?
(589 WORDS) — Who knew the genius bees use to make delicious honey for us doesn’t stop there? Research highlighted by the Discovery Institute leads to a key question about goal-directed behaviors among bees and the origin of such abilities.
In an article “Bee-ing There: Innovative Behavior by Bees,” for the Discovery Institute’s Science & Culture Today, author Eric Cassell discusses numerous studies related to bees’ goal-reaching behavior as potentially learned. Implications may warrant a closer look.
Photo by Dmitry Grigoriev on Unsplash
Cassell is the author of Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts and is an expert in navigation systems, including GPS. He has had a long-time interest in animal navigation. He has more than four decades of experience in systems engineering related to aircraft navigation and safety.
He has served as an engineering consultant for NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); has developed computer algorithms for safety systems; and has published numerous technical papers.
His academic training includes bachelor’s degrees in biology (George Mason University) and electrical engineering (Villanova University), and a master’s in science and religion from Biola University, which included the history and philosophy of science.
Experiment results indicate bees are capable of learning goal-related tasks with purpose, described as teleological. Insects with small brains and short life spans can adapt to circumstances that help them reach goals, proposing intelligence based on intricate design.
For example, the introduction of a ball for movement that provides a reward upon interaction, even if moved for “play,” can reveal that animals such as bees are more intelligent than previously understood. These observations indicate the further behavioral details of these animals is studied, the more may be learned about the scope of nature.
“A key question is: What is the origin of these capabilities? Is it the result of millions of years of random variation and natural selection, or some other process? The behaviors are complex and require the design of brains that support sufficient cognitive capability, ” Cassell writes.
The idea of going along and running into something, like watching a bug bump into an obstacle, then watching it figure out a way to get around it, could come across as insignificant.
This type of activity suggests learned responses that lead to reached goals may easily be explained as innovative. But is there more to it than that?
How Does the Bee Learn?
What might seem simple about bumping against an object and reacting to whether that object may be used, removed or averted, in order to get around it and continue toward a goal, shows how science raises questions about rational intelligence that life uses.
Reports on experiments about insects such as bees indicate that life uses logic and reason. This further emphasizes complexity that intelligent design requires.
These questions can lead to ways human beings may imitate behaviors that advance life-saving medicine, transportation, agriculture, for example, resulting in many beneficial discoveries.
Cassell examines that the best inference, similar throughout experiment results, is intelligent design is due, in part to, complexity and order of species.
“The design of organisms that have sufficient brain complexity and that produce these goal-directed behaviors requires an intelligent agent. Therefore, the best explanation for the origin is intelligent design,” Cassell notes.
To adjust and adapt, then overcome obstacles – that we can learn from behaviors and just how complex these behaviors can be –once closely observed with the naked eye, then what can appear as whole other worlds under powerful microscopes, highlights more intricacies of life further research may discover.
Amanda Hughes is a HillFaith contributing writer. She is the author of “Who Wants to be Free?” available on Amazon books.
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