# Bees Committing Suicide **URL:** \ **Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\ **Created:** [August 31, 2001, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164 "2001-08-31T18:15:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![billy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecd19e/32.png) [@billy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billy)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/21 "2001-09-06T21:47:28Z")
You guys are arguing the wrong thing when discussing programming vs free thought. Humans also display a great amount of programming where survival is concerned. Drinking water when thirsty, shaking when cold, fight or flight when threatened. That is stuff you are born with. Even newborn babies know to cry when hungry and smile when happy. The best bit of programming we have is that we learn things from our environment and can use it with choice. As for darwin, there is no reason why a little robot with first class programming can’t be replaced with a little robot with better programming. Mostly I agree with Doug, Darwin is dead when it comes to humans. We lost the ability to evolve when we conquered the environment and invented medicine. 1000 years from now, we will all be prone to develop lukemia, have asthma, and a host of other deseases that 100 years ago would have killed you before reproductive age. And being smart these days doesn’t exactly make you more likely to pass on your genes. The smart people are using condoms. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2001, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/22 "2001-09-06T22:12:26Z")
“Free will” is a great big thorny problem that I personally don’t think anyone has a really good answer for. I just want to concentrate a bit here on the question of humans having a quality which bees entirely lack. That quality could be “free will”, or it could be the ability to metabolize some nutrient or something. > [@](#): > > I may be mistaken but I think the current theory is that modern green plants absorbed photosynthesizing components into their cells at some time in the past. Had humans done the same then we would be able to get energy from the sun. In other words, the capacity was already there, certain organisms got it while others didn’t. My point is, however plants got the ability to photosynthesize, they have it and we don’t. There’s no need to postulate that humans photosynthesize, but on a very low level. We don’t photosynthesize at all. This is not to say that we don’t ultimately share a common ancestor with plants. But somewhere back there (just to make up a very simplified “Just So” tale), a single-celled organism divided in two. One daughter cell went on to engulf a photosynthesizing bacterium. The other did not. The plants are descended from the cell which learned to photosynthesize; we’re descended from the other cell. We do have a common ancestor with the plants, but we don’t photosynthesize to any degree at all–we are different from plants in kind, not degree when it comes to photosynthesis. > [@](#): > > Yes, descended from other creatures that could see. But I’m not claiming, say, that early human ancestors had little wings like bees that fell off later. What I’m saying is that there was some flatworm or something that was the ancestor of bees and humans. It had neither the capability for flight nor the capacity for advanced cognitive processes (self-awareness, abstract reasoning and problem-solving abilities, however you want to define it). It was a biological robot which crawled around on the ground or swam through the water. Its descendants diverged into various lines. Some went on to become insects, and developed flight. They became flying biological robots, with very complex and elegant programming. Others became vertebrates, and ultimately a branch of them became mammals and primates, and some of them developed their abstract reasoning capabilities to a very high degree. > [@](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > . . . bees and humans diverged a _looong_ time ago. > > So did dogs and humans. Does that mean dogs are little robots? Many people don’t think so. I think they have good reasons for that. I don’t think dogs are robots either. But dogs and humans diverged _much_ more recently than humans and bees. > [@](#): > > The question then becomes, how did “free will” evolve and, if some evolutionary lines don’t have it, which ones do? As I said, I don’t know how “free will” evolved. It’s possibly that fairly high degrees of abstract problem-solving have evolved on this planet more than once. Many cephalopods (squids and octopuses) are reportedly quite bright when it comes to solving problems in novel situations. I had a college professor who opined that some cephalopods might be as smart as cats, and I don’t think cats are just biological robots. It’s quite possible that the last common ancestor of squids and cats was a biological robot, and that cephalopods and mammals have independently evolved those advanced problem-solving abilities, and maybe also some degree of self-awareness or “feelings”. The last common ancestor of bats and birds was a flightless creature. Bats and birds independently evolved the ability to fly. > [@](#): > > My contention is essentially that if “free will,” or more precisely consciousness, however defined, confers an evolutionary advantage somehow then it must do so at a very early point, earlier even than bees, perhaps even at the level of single cells. Why? Flight is obviously advantageous enough that it’s evolved at least four times (insects, pterodactyls, birds, and bats), but obviously not every organism has evolved flight, and some organisms from the flying groups have lost the ability or drastically curtailed it (penguins or ants). Biological robots seem quite successful. It remains to be seen if self-awareness will be more successful in the long run than biological roboticism. There are also many, many ways to be successful. At any rate, there’s no reason to think self-awareness isn’t a recent innovation, just like land life is a recent innovation compared to living in the sea, or mammary glands are a recent innovation compared to leaving your eggs someplace to hatch on their own. I don’t think bees have demonstrated the ability to learn in the way a dog or a chimpanzee or a human can learn. Human brains and ape brains and dog brains or cat brains all have anatomical structures in common which seem associated with emotion or some degree of self-awareness. Insect brains don’t really have the same structure as ours at all; even reptiles have brains which resemble our R-complex, but insects are far more distant from us than that. And single-celled organisms don’t have brains at all, just chemicals. ---
**Author:** ![barbitu8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/839c29/32.png) [@barbitu8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/barbitu8)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2001, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/23 "2001-09-07T00:11:42Z")
[QUOTE] \*Originally posted by Tom Arctus \* \*\* Conversely, if dogs don’t have souls then neither do humans. Now, for “souls,” read “consciousness.” \*\* [QUOTE] Why? A soul, in religion, survives body death and has life in eternity. Aquinas reasoned that only Man has a soul because only Man can think about God and eternity. Since Man can envision infinite items (God and eternity), his soul must be eternal. Animals, as far as we know, can not think about such matters. Animals that don’t have brains, as plants (which don’t) have no conscious. Plants trail the sun, but that’s not a conscious act. It’s all chemical-related. A creature with no brain has no consciousness: everything is chemical and electrical cause and effect. Plants can perform photosynthesis, but the difference between that ability and man’s inability is copper instead of iron. Man has hemoglobin, which carries oxygen. Plants have copper in place of the hemoglobin, and that allows it to photosynthesize. So, is that a difference in kind or of degree? > [@](#): > > \*\*Reverse the positions of animals and humans in this statement and I don’t think a being from Mars, using only observed behavior, could tell which was doing “what they must” and which had “free will or consciousness.” The statement also assumes without warrant that every shark always acts only in ways that increase the likelihood of its individual survival and/or the perpetuation of its species, while some humans may not. > > My contention, to state it a different way, is that if a shark feels excited or happy or amused (or whatever the shark-like equivalents of these human emotions may be) over the prospect of eating something then it is more likely to be successful. Further, that sharks (and dogs and bees) probably have some ability to formulate, evaluate and act on alternative courses of action in at least some situations; which will do for a definition of “free will” until a better comes along. \*\* I don’t think so. A shark will be on the trail of a fish that a fisherman has hooked. The fish is brought up on the boat. The shark senses electrical fields emanating from a swimmer and goes after the swimmer, since that indicates that there is a live animal there. This is all programmed. No free will. ME Buckner, you overlooked one of the brightest species on this planet: the whale family. (I think that’s the cetacean family, but I’m not going to look it up.) ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Arctus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71c47a/32.png) [@Tom\_Arctus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Arctus)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2001, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/24 "2001-09-07T18:38:54Z")
Thanks for the insightful comments. If I understand ME Buckner correctly, the contention is that flight evolved independently on multiple occasions (_e.g._ for bees, for birds, for butterflies) and so consciousness may have done the same. It seems to me this ducks the question of _why_ flight or consciousness evolved, which is, I assume, because both confer an evolutionary advantage and/or allow the species with the capability to occupy a vacant niche, as it were, in the ecosystem. My question then becomes why we should we think our particular brand of consciousness confers any advantage. Why should we have a rich interior experience of life when we might have been just as successful without one? Arguably we might be better off with the same set of behaviors, reactions, capabilities for higher reasoning _etc._ but without, say, emotions, an acute sense of pain or cold, or religious prejudices. In other words, why isn’t our life, to paraphrase barbitu8, somethiing like this: > [@](#): > > Animals that . . . have brains, as plants (which don’t) have no conscious. Plants trail the sun, [and humans react to similar stimuli,] but that’s not a conscious act. It’s all chemical-related. A creature with [a brain or with] no brain has no consciousness: everything is chemical and electrical cause and effect. My argument would be that consciousness or at least some degree of self-awareness must be so basic to evolutionary success that it had to have evolved very early. It would be more like the ability to create and use energy from simple molecules or to exclude noxious substances from the interiors of cells than it would be like the ability to move through the air or grasp inanimate objects. That of course rubs against the grain of the high opinion we humans have of ourselves and our conscious abilities. I don’t agree that humans have somehow evolved beyond the capacity to evolve, but even if we had I’d be glad of it. Evolutionary pressures, like the state of nature to which they belong, would only make life “nasty, brutish and short.” Aquinas (and Descartes after him) conceived his otherwise convincing argument without knowledge of the theory of evolution. He also believed the sun, moon, planets and stars orbited the Earth. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2001, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/25 "2001-09-07T21:13:07Z")
Tom Arctus said: > [@](#): > > Why should we have a rich interior experience of life when we might have been just as successful without one? Arguably we might be better off with the same set of behaviors, reactions, capabilities for higher reasoning etc. but without, say, emotions, an acute sense of pain or cold, or religious prejudices. > > My argument would be that consciousness or at least some degree of self-awareness must be so basic to evolutionary success that it had to have evolved very early. It would be more like the ability to create and use energy from simple molecules or to exclude noxious substances from the interiors of cells than it would be like the ability to move through the air or grasp inanimate objects. That of course rubs against the grain of the high opinion we humans have of ourselves and our conscious abilities. I think this requires some clarification of definitions. What is consciousness, for instance? This is the second time you refer to sensing pain as part of consciousness, but that then requires clarifying what is pain? Is pain the neurochemical signals? If so, then higher order animals certainly qualify, and it could be argued that worms and insects feel pain. What about amoebas? Plants? They have some sort of response to injury - is that pain? Or is pain something else, activated in the processing of the signal? By that reasoning, we can certainly elimiate plants and one-celled animals, and probably debate about worms and insects, but surely animals have some processing of the sensations. So how is that consciousness? I’m reminded of the old “If a tree falls in the forest” bit, if an animal gets injured but doesn’t have a brain, does it feel pain? So what is consciousness? Is it awareness and response to external stimuli? Is it something more, having to do with awareness of consequences, considerations of “the grand scheme”? And just how different are humans from other animals? Studies on dolphins and apes show a lot of similarities in thought processes, including (debated) ability to understand sentences and communicate. (Dolphin research uses a gesture language with its own syntax.) I think biology recognizes that reaction to external stimuli was advantageous and therefore an early trait to develop, but I don’t think that most people call that consciousness. It is clearly a long developmental process tracing through evolution. The question is at what point does it become consciousness, and in what exact ways are we different from other animals, and why. And I’m not even going near the “soul” argument. ---
**Author:** ![barbitu8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/839c29/32.png) [@barbitu8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/barbitu8)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2001, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/26 "2001-09-07T21:38:17Z")
Pain receptors in the brain cause the sensation of pain. No brain, no pain. And, as you know, pain is a good thing. It tells us something is wrong. People born without the nerveways to feel pain are in constant fear of injuring themselves fatally. I think, and this is debatable, that consciousness is the realization or the ability to understand the concept of “self.” A conscious person knows he is and knows other things exist other than himself. He is aware of himself. Awareness of the grand scheme is not part of consciousness. Response to external stimulii does not need a consciousness. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Arctus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71c47a/32.png) [@Tom\_Arctus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Arctus)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2001, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/27 "2001-09-07T22:02:42Z")
There is clearly a stimulus/response mechanism that, for example, jerks one’s hand away from a hot stove even before one realizes that one’s hand is hot. But after such an experience one’s hand still _hurts_. Why? Wouldn’t it be better for us if we had the stimulus/response mechanism, and the learning mechanism that helps prevent us from putting our hands on hot stoves in the future, without the “owie?” If not, then the “owie” must be part of what makes us better able to survive than other animals that may not get “owies” – as barbitu8 points out. Getting “owies” and other such _conscious_ interior experiences exclusive of autonomous reflexes is what I’ll call “consciousness” for now. The argument “no brain, no pain” again suggests that “owies” and such are merely side effects of having a complicated enough neural network; in other words, that it might be possible to be a zombie, in every way resembling a normal human being but without any of what I’m calling consciousness. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2001, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/28 "2001-09-08T03:01:19Z")
> [@](#): > > My argument would be that consciousness or at least some degree of self-awareness must be so basic to evolutionary success that it had to have evolved very early. Ummm…_why_ do you think this is so? What actual argument would you advance in support of this? ---
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2001, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/29 "2001-09-08T15:58:44Z")
> [@](#): > > What I’m saying is that there was some flatworm or something that was the ancestor of bees and humans. Actually, the last common ancestor of bees and humans was something in the jellyfish line, with, literally, no brain at all. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2001, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/30 "2001-09-08T17:58:32Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by John W. Kennedy \* > > > [@](#): > > > > What I’m saying is that there was some flatworm or something that was the ancestor of bees and humans. > > Actually, the last common ancestor of bees and humans was something in the jellyfish line, with, literally, no brain at all. I thought the last common ancestor of the Chordates and the Arthropods was some kind of bilaterally-symmetrical coelomate (which isn’t actually a “flatworm”). I dunno what kind of nervous system the ur-coelomate had; maybe a longitudinal nerve cord of some kind? ---
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2001, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/31 "2001-09-08T19:24:18Z")
Hmmm… Looks like the details of the diagram have been fleshed out a bit since my day (not surprising, considering how much rethinking there has been among the very vertebrates). When I was a lad, the split roughly corresponding to that between modern protostomes and deuterostomes included everything above coelenterates. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2001, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/32 "2001-09-08T19:53:26Z")
The [“Tree of Life”](http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/life.html) is a really cool website and good for tracking the latest thinking on this sort of stuff. Of course there’s a lot of controversy about many of these issues, which they seem pretty up front about. ---
**Author:** ![C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2001, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/33 "2001-09-08T23:32:24Z")
I thought the last common ancestor of the jellyfish and mankind was now in the U.S. Senate? ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Arctus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71c47a/32.png) [@Tom\_Arctus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Arctus)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2001, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/34 "2001-09-10T17:41:14Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by MEBuckner \* > \*\*Ummm…_why_ do you think this is so? What actual argument would you advance in support of this? \*\* It would run something like this: Modern humans are the end result of evolutionary processes. Humans are conscious (at least I am, I’m not so sure about the rest of you but I’ll concede the point for now). It’s reasonable to assume that consciousness and its elements, however defined, confers an evolutionary advantage and that at least some nonhuman animals possess consciousness that differs from ours in degree rather than in kind. Discounting the “soul” argument, there doesn’t seem to be a clear line of separation with respect to consciousness between humans and nonhuman animals or between one nonhuman animal species and another. I likewise challenge the assumption that behavior that may seem to an observer to be “mechanical” or “programmed” cannot be conscious and/or learned. I draw the conclusion that consciousness, as a trait that confers evolutionary advantage, may well have been selected for at a very early time, closer to cell walls and ATP utilization than opposable thumbs and linguistic ability. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2001, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/35 "2001-09-11T00:12:18Z")
> [@](#): > > Modern humans are the end result of evolutionary processes. Okay. > [@](#): > > Humans are conscious (at least I am, I’m not so sure about the rest of you but I’ll concede the point for now). Okay. > [@](#): > > It’s reasonable to assume that consciousness and its elements, however defined, confers an evolutionary advantage… Okay. > [@](#): > > …and that at least some nonhuman animals possess consciousness that differs from ours in degree rather than in kind. Okay. > [@](#): > > Discounting the “soul” argument, there doesn’t seem to be a clear line of separation with respect to consciousness between humans and nonhuman animals or between one nonhuman animal species and another. Okay. > [@](#): > > I likewise challenge the assumption that behavior that may seem to an observer to be “mechanical” or “programmed” cannot be conscious and/or learned. Well, it _might_ be. But there are ways to test for learned as opposed to programmed behavior. Can the organism change its behavior in response to novel situations? Can it learn new things? > [@](#): > > I draw the conclusion that consciousness, as a trait that confers evolutionary advantage, may well have been selected for at a very early time, closer to cell walls and ATP utilization than opposable thumbs and linguistic ability. See, this is where I don’t follow you. Bipedalism is something which all humans, who are the end-products of an evolutionary process, normally share. It presumably confers some evolutionary advantage on humans. Australopithecines were evidently bipedal, and our nearest living relatives at least occasionally exhibit bipedalism. But bipedalism isn’t something primordial, like cell walls or ATP utilization; it has recently (within the last few million years) evolved within the hominid family of primates. I don’t see any reason to suppose that consciousness is something as primordial as ATP, as opposed to something which evolved relatively recently. We _know_ that humans are conscious, because they talk about it all the time. Since chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas can learn fairly sophisticated language skills, we have good reason to suspect a fundamental similarity there, too. Looking at other fairly large-brained mammals, like dogs and cats, we see that they a) do exhibit a capacity for learning and b) they have similar anatomical structures in their brains to humans. With bees we don’t seem to see either of those two conditions: they don’t, as far as I know, exhibit any capacity for learning or learned language use (as opposed to hard-coded communications to signal the other bees where the nectar is) and they don’t have brains which are anatomically similar to ours. ---
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2001, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/36 "2001-09-11T21:18:06Z")
And consider the fact that some insects are demonstrably _not_ equipped with anything like consciousness, such as three-step behaviors where, if Step 1 is undone by the experimenter while the insect is performing Step 2, it will, a hundred times, or a thousand, unnecessarily repeat Step 2 after necessarily repeating Step 1, rather than skipping ahead to Step 3. ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_Yanega](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5e925/32.png) [@Doug\_Yanega](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_Yanega)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2001, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164/37 "2001-09-14T21:42:45Z")
> [@](#): > > Well, it _might_ be. But there are ways to test for learned as opposed to programmed behavior. Can the organism change its behavior in response to novel situations? Can it learn new things? > (snip) With bees we don’t seem to see either of those two conditions: they don’t, as far as I know, exhibit any capacity for learning… Bees do learn, and their lives depend on it. They can do complex geometry, too. However, the only thing they can learn _from one another_ is simply the acquisition of new information, NOT learning a new behavior. In other words, no culture, which is something that appears to require self-awareness (because to be self-aware implies you can recognize other individuals in a proper context). No evidence for self-awareness, thus no evidence for “consciousness”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bees-committing-suicide/79164.md?page=1)