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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.'"
Nails? Coffins? Intelligent Design? Pfft! What do these have to do with each other? Why do bees fly?
Because they forgot how to teleport!
man, i thought everyone knew that already .. all you had to do was ask them.
Cal Tech shouldn't be worrying about beating back old riddles posed by the flocks and get back to the business at hand of figuring out how to hack scoreboards.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Scientists Figure Out How Bees Fly
Well, doh, by moving their little wings up and down quickly?
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From TFA:
Try this!
In order to understand how bees carry such heavy cargo, the researchers forced the bees to fly in a small chamber filled with a mixture of oxygen and helium that is less dense than regular air.
"Try this!" I should try what? I am not sure about these researchers, but I do not yet have wings and an air tank. Maybe they're overestimating the Try-This-At-Home market a little.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
ID people: We must be right because you can't explain everything.
Evolution People: Wait a sec, we figured something else out, you are now wrong.
Is it just me or does this have nothing to do with any scientific arguement?
As a Christian Pastor, I believe the world, and everything in it, was indeed created by God. But I also believe that he is a God of order, and thus there is an order to all things that can be observed and recorded. As science progresses, I would expect that many things that are a mystery to us today would be explained and understood. The fact that there is a scientific explanation for these things does not disprove the existence of God. Sure, for many in the creationist camp, science and God have no business mixing. But there are also those who believe as I do. Why do God and Science have to be mutually exclusive?
Researchers at CalTech have discovered how bees fly, putting one more nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design.
So seriously...were these CalTech researchers purposed with finding one more way to discredit ID, or is that just the agenda of our story's submitter (and the original article's author)?
Now, if the ID advocates had their way, we would have just said, "Hey, God makes bees fly. Since I already know the real reason, there's no real reason to keep studying it."
/. nutjob to argue that knowing how bees fly refutes I.D.
Horse-pucky. You're making the same false argument that various religious advocates make when they say "since some Scientists are Atheists, supporting Science is supporting Atheism."
There are some I.D. advocates who don't know the first thing about science. And there are some who, on every other topic except evolution, are indisinguishable from other speakers or scientists.
By and large, "how Bees fly" says nothing about whether it was an evolved behavior or a constructed behavior. It's wrong for a moronic I.D. advocate to argue so, and it's wrong for a
News Bulletin: Scientists have now accurately determined the mass of Pluto, further proving that Pluto is not actually a God, but a planet. This adds one more nail into the coffin of Greek and Roman mythology.
WTF??? Why did the article even see a need to comment about the impact on this psuedoscience theory. The researchers looking into bee flight weren't doing it to disprove ID. It sounds like some pissed-off researcher, or perhaps a news reporter with an agenda, decided to throw in an off-hand comment about ID. It cheapens the research.
OK, I'll bite.
I, myself, as a scientist and an atheist (although I believe the two have nothing to do with each other) have never read the important works of ID.
As an ID supporter, I am led to believe that you are liely an authority on what those important works are, and I ask you to kindly list those which you feel are most important.
I give you my word that I will read them all with a totally open mind.
No reason at all.
Its just that people are silly and like to argue.
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!
"When you do things right, people won't be sure if you did anything at all."
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I've always found it perplexing that the ID crowd and the Evolutionist crowd can never seem to get along. It seems to me that there is no real conflict of interest: is it not possible that God created evolution? That is to say, yes, there could have been an initial creator being, but he was smart enough to create a self-automating system of creation. He/she got the ball rolling, then just let it go. That seems to satisfy both camps if they just let it.
The ID crowd shouldn't be so naïve as to say that God is up there controlling the every movements of a bee's wings, but the Evolutionist crowd should be more open to the possibility that all things in the known world had a start initiated by intelligence rather than "it just magically happened." That's just as ingenuous as saying God just magically controls everything.
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As someone who believes in creationism and hard science, I think both sides of the argument are taking the issue as black and white instead of realizing if a higher being really did create everything, then there's far more gray area involved.
The people on the science side should continue researching as they have in the past. They're doing great research that can teach us about a number of things, and that research can be used in future technology. Those that don't believe there's a God can continue not believing it.
The people on the ID side should realize that if God did create everything, he's probably smart enough to design things in such a way that it can be explained through science as well. My personal belief is that everything, with the exclusion of miracles, can be explained through science, and that God did this so that people really can have a choice between believing and not believing. In any case, it shouldn't be an issue since the Bible doesn't teach us to argue stuff like this, it teaches us moral lessons like loving one another. People like Pat Robertson give Christianity a bad name. The same is true for terrorists and extremists (the Iranian leader) with Islam.
As for teaching it in school, I don't believe it's right to do so. ID should be taught in Sunday School as it always has been. Christians should try using science to explain their faith, not try to argue that they're opposites. There have been many great scientists in history that have also been religious. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
In the end it's up to each person to decide what they want to believe, but trying to force faith-based arguments into the classroom is the same as trying to force evolution into church.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Why do God and Science have to be mutually exclusive?
Personally, I'm more impressed by a "God" that can design the rules to the universe and start the big bang more than one who just created everything "as is", in motion.
They don't have to be mutually exclusive. It's the nature of, forgive me for sounding cruel, low intelligence people to turn things in to a black and white equation. They also happen to be a vocal bunch in this country, which is unfortunate. I also believe they are the minority, but a very vocal minority.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Intelligent Design is not so much believing that God made the world. That's an essential part of many religions and something that religious scientists would not dispute. They tend to believe as you seem to, that God is more evident in the system than in the results. (The results -- such as people -- being a product of the system -- say, evolution. Of course, God, being omniscient, would have no trouble designing a system such that any desired result would occur.)
ID really refers specifically to evolution. In short: "Intelligent Design (or ID) is a highly controversial claim holding that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent designer, rather than an undirected process such as natural selection." It is not so much the presence of an intelligent designer that is the problem, but rather the denouncement of an undirected process. One of their frequent claims is that some systems are so complex that a seemingly random process such as evolution could not have produced them.
Delightfully complex systems arising out of simple rules should not be a surprise to scientists or mathematicians. Whether or not this property is a base property of nature or the work of God is up to you, there's not any way to differentiate.
I was intrigued at the prospect of discovering how beers fly!
You've never been to a trailer park, I take it.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
The science in the article is good; it's a pity they had to throw in the gratutious creationist-bashing.
Nope. I'm adverse to tornados.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
So Altshuler claims, without any supporting evidence, that unnamed "people" in the undefined "ID community" make a big deal out of the unknowability of bee flight mechanics, and that having disproved this unkowability, he's successfully countered their alleged arugment?
Wow.
Also, is it just me, or does the article not actually explain how bees fly?
As far as I can tell, this article tells us three things:
1. That bee flight is exotic. (Which is pretty much a tautology; if bee flight were mundane, we would have figured it out a long time ago.)
2. That we learn more about bee flight by using robots with force sensors than we do using fixed-wing aerodynamic theory.
3. That however bees fly, they have to work harder at it in thinner atmosphere, and that it involves amplitude increases rather than frequency increases.
Which all means what, exactly?
You'd think that an article about how we've finally discovered the secret of bee flight would spend rather more time explaining it, and rather less time on such non-newsworthy aspects of the story such as what the researcher believes the current state of play in the ID debate is.
I mean, bees flying! A mystery that has eluded smarty men for a hundred years or more! Finally solved! And nothing in the article actually approaches a description of the solution.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The first sentence begins with "Proponents of intelligent design..."
It is the proponents of ID that have used the inability to explain things as the foundation of their theory, saying "science is incapable of explaining X." So, when science explains "X" they then say "well, okay, so you CAN explain X... uhm, er, we bet you can't explain Y! You can't can you?! SEE!!!!" (flash forward a few years) "Uh, yeah, we can explain that to." "But, but, what about Z?!?! That's REALLY hard!"
Ad nauseam. Yawn.
So, yes, both the article and summary are "flamebait," but damned amusing, since I remember this exact example being given during my parochial school days. Just because something is flamebait doesn't mean it isn't noteworthy.
Agree with parent. Exactly how does figuring something out eliminate design from the equation? I can figure out how a remote works, but that doesn't mean it wasn't designed. The two concepts (explaining how something works and whether it was designed to work that way) aren't mutually exclusive.
I think intelligent design arguments were stating that since we can't figure out how things work or comprehend them, that they must have been created by something superior intelligence above our own.
This isn't exactly the same as the eye argument in which they say the eye is too complicated to evolved on its own, but rather we are just too stupid to understand and therefore something of higher intelligence must have made it.
What this article is trying to say is that their original argument that "science could not figure out how bees fly meant that science in general was invalid and to be discared" is invalid.
However, I'm sure a higher intelligence could have made bees with the ability to create worm holes and use their collective hive mind to hunt down intergalactic pollen throughout the universe rather than the mundane little beings that they are.
But maybe the FSM had different designs for them...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The myth here is that science never ever said there _couldn't have been_ an Intelligent Designer. All science is saying is, "look, we can explain these things without resorting to a designer - whether there has been one or not, we dont _need_ him."
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
I also don't like the summary because it almost grants the notion that science has to have an answer for absolutely everything or else creation must be true. Really, that's the line of argument that creationists use, that there can be no unexplained mechanism or gap in the fossil record, and if there is it's evidence that evolution (or whatever) can't account for reality.
Really, this notion is what needs to be argued from the top, rather than trying to come up with better fossil records and better mechanism to explain the compound eye or bee flight or whatever. Because no matter how many things science does explain, there will always be *something* it doesn't, and they'll fall back on that to make their argument.
In other words, science doesn't need to explain everything to be the right approach, it just has to fit the available evidence as well as possible. For creationism to be "right" it needs to, for once, generate a testable, disproveable hypothesis and stop falling back on the old "anything we can't explain is God's will" argument.
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.
Reportedly, years ago a biologist and a physicist met over dinner or something, and the subject came up about the physics of bee flight. Some back of the paper napkin calculations by the physicist didn't work, and they were overheard by someone who reported to the press that "science proves bees can't fly." Of course, everyone knows that bees can fly, so it was seen as a "har har, those silly scientists, they don't know anything." Science gets it wrong, so science is just a bunch of stuffed-shirt eggheads in labs that have convinced themselves they know something when they really don't know anything.
However, it neatly ignored the fact that not too long after that discovery, the question raised actually led to further investigation of the subject and much was learned about insect flight. This story shows much is still being learned from that event.
What really happened in this case, is someone detected an error. Science has a long history of individuals who found errors in our understanding of the universe. In fact, virtually all the famous names of science are famous because they uncovered an error in our understanding. It is simply by the detection of errors that science advances. Science is a philosophy that learns from its mistakes, and in fact, without the discovery of mistakes it really isn't learning much. It's in trying to determine what's going on with a discovered mistake that science moves forward.
Consequently, every time I hear someone claim something to the effect of "oh look, here's where science got it wrong," I point to it and say, "oh look, here's where science learned something. Here's where science made progress."
To the extent that ID is looking for mistakes in science, it will actually improve our understanding of the universe, which includes evolution. Where ID differs from science, is that not only is no one in ID even looking for mistakes in ID, ID isn't even capable of making mistakes, because their explanations would explain any phenomena-- and an explanation that explains everything really doesn't explain anything. Drop an apple and it falls down? It's ID. Drop an apple and it falls up? It's ID. There's no knowledge content to such an explanation.
Any philosophy that is not capable of discovering its mistakes, must be either perfect or error-prone. And, since no human endeavor or understanding can be said to be perfect, I'd say it's pretty clear which it is. Science too is not perfect, but it has one thing the other philosophies do not, and that is at least some ability to detect its errors. Given the choice between a philosophy that can detect at least some of its errors, and one that pretends it can't make any errors, I think the choice should be pretty easy to make.
Some suggest that scientists are in some kind of conspiracy or cover up. Such a suggestion is completely ignorant of how science and scientists operate. While an individual scientist may find it difficult to uncover errors in their own work, scientists are fully aware that careers are made by uncovering an interesting mistake in another scientists work, and would trumpet such a discovery to the high hills instantly. Conspiracy, indeed.
ID proponents only succeed because they are not the only ones ignorant of these basic realities. Unfortunately, science education and interest is so weak that a large piece of the populace is similarly ignorant.
Even those who aren't anti-evolution or particularly religious may believe in things like astrology, for example. But when was the last time anyone was recognized for finding an error in our "understanding" of astrology? Astronomy has a long list of names of those who've uncovered errors in our understanding: Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, etc.., for example, and there are many many more. Where's the list of names that have improved the quality of astrological knowl
For creationism to be "right" it needs to, for once, generate a testable, disproveable hypothesis and stop falling back on the old "anything we can't explain is God's will" argument.
Interestingly, this is not only bad science, it's bad theology. It's know as the "God of the gaps" problem, and it sets up a false conflict between science and religion. Just because we understand something doesn't make it any less wonderful.
Given that I'm a flaming atheist, this will sound weird. However, I disagree.
I think science is about explaining how things are, not why they are or what we should do about it. Philosophy gives you a set of tools for approaching those questions and has a lot of interesting historical information on what people have said. But there's no right answer to many of philosophy's most interesting questions. For many people, they get those answers from one religion or another.
There is also an area that religion addresses that philosophy and science don't address at all: the lived experience of humankind, especially what many would call the spiritual side of things. Some Buddhist schools, for example, have nothing to say about gods or devils but a lot to say about how to live one's life in accordance with particular beliefs, like The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path. Consider this quote:
You'd think some monk or preacher said that. Turns out, it was Albert Einstein.