Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Figure Out How Bees Fly
corbettw writes "Researchers at CalTech have discovered how bees fly, putting one more nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design. From the article: 'People in the ID community have said that we don't even know how bees fly ... We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.'"
People in the ID community have said that we don't even know how bees fly ... We were finally able to put this one to rest.
"Finally able to put this one to rest"????
This taken from 1993!
Author: underdog
Text: Can you explain "how" it is that a bee is capable of flying?
Response #: 1 of 1
Author: ProfBill
Text: This is just an old engineering myth. There really is not a
problem understanding how bees fly. The muscles that move the wings down are
powerful enough to generated enough force to lift the weight of the bee. On
the downstroke, the wings are "feathered", that is turned vertically so that
moving up they do not generated a force down to undo all the work of lifting
the bee in the first place. Much like a rower turns the oar parallel to the
water on the return stroke, but perpendicular to the water to generate force
on the power stroke. It all adds up just fine. The real unanswered question
is how the bee's nervous system coordinates all this, especially the bit
about compensating for wind, turning, etc.
As far as I can see the only difference with this article is they've got a bit more detail on it, talk about sensationalist headlines!
Sure.. but then the ID crowd needs to explain how something as complex as the intelligent designer came to be. What created the "intelligent designer"? Surely something is irreducibly complex as a being that could create the known universe must have had its own intelligent designer? No?
It's an endless circle that the ID crowd can't resolve, so they usually ignore.
Their typical answer, when pressed, is... "well.. God just is." No beginning, no end. Well then, why can't we equally say.. with exactly as much evidence.. the Universe just is. It's been an endless series of big-bang/expand/contract/big-bang-again forever.. that's as plausible as the "God just is" line.
A supreme being may exist.. No one can prove otherwise. But a supreme being is not necessary to explain the universe we live in.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Here is an article from a Christian perspective that uses bees to argue ID.
I read about this in The Straight Dope ten or fifteen years ago. The Cal Tech folks seem to have added some new nuances to the discussion, but it was adequately understood long before this. The full story evidently goes back to the 1930s.
Nothin to see here, folks, move along.
Most emphatically NO.
ID exists exclusively as, and was created for, a tool to aid religious fundamentalists to do only a few things:
Violate the constitution of the United States of America
Cast doubt in the minds of young people in the fundamental working of the sciences
Become the thin end of the wedge for the eventual goals of various forms of Christian Reconstructionism.
ID has no basis in fact or reality.
ID did not spring from spiritual thought but rather as a response to legal setbacks
The religious extremists who promote ID repetitively have lied, deceived, cajoled, threatened, and even perjured themselves in their efforts to discredit science and get ID in the class room.
I am all for religious tolerance and I am religious myself, but I absolutely will not tolerate dishonest and unethical religious extremists and I'm honestly outraged at the suggestion that I should.
Having said all of that the ID comment in the submission is inappropriate but I can understand the sentiment.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Intelligent Design has been shown to be a religiously motivated political movement. There are no "good ID" people tirelessly toiling away to find evidence of a designer. All of the work of the Intelligent Design movement involves two things:
1. Finding "gaps" in science that they can exploit.
2. Promoting the ID worldview in public life through political lobying on the local and national level.
To say that there are "good ID" people out there doing honest work to further the scope of human knowledge is to reward their dishonesty.
Religion is mostly static though. It's a reactionary force. People aren't encouraged to re-write the bible, or even question widely held Christian beliefs. That's the fundamental flaw of relious doctrines. Nothing new will be added to the bible in a hundred years, and, likewise, nothing new will be added to the body of knowledge in any other religion. Also, religion requires you to accept things to be true without any explaination. Most arguments against creationism are based on its conflicts with observable reality. This is different from the argument that because we don't know how bees fly, that evolution must be false. The first is proof by contradiction, the second is a non-sequitur.
Specifically, there's a goodly list of publications that address some of his examples here. Of course, with those examples taken care of, it's always possible to posit more irreducibly complex looking structures. You can do it forever, but it's still nothing more than god-in-the-gaps.
You should read the transcript for the Dover Intelligent Design case. When 50+ journal articles describing theoretical pathways for one of his examples of irreducible complexity were listed to him, he didn't have a whole lot to say. He either hadn't read them or he dismissed them in their entirety. I'm sure he still does consider his challenge unmet, but the biolgical community at large certainly doesn't. In fact, Behe was taken to task for it rather sternly in the judge's decision.An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"