Scientists Figure Out How Bees Fly 1237
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.'"
Article contents (Score:2, Informative)
Sara Goudarzi
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com Tue Jan 10, 9:00 AM ET
Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life's complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
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Now scientists have put this perplexing mystery to rest.
Using a combination of high-speed digital photography and a robotic model of a bee wing, the researchers figured out the flight mechanisms of honeybees.
"For many years, people tried to understand animal flight using the aerodynamics of airplanes and helicopters," said Douglas Altshuler, a researcher at California Institute of Technology. "In the last 10 years, flight biologists have gained a remarkable amount of understanding by shifting to experiments with robots that are capable of flapping wings with the same freedom as the animals."
Exotic flight
The scientists analyzed pictures from hours of filming bees and mimicked the movements using robots with sensors for measuring forces.
Turns out bee flight mechanisms are more exotic than thought.
"The honeybees have a rapid wing beat," Altshuler told LiveScience. "In contrast to the fruit fly that has one eightieth the body size and flaps its wings 200 times each second, the much larger honeybee flaps its wings 230 times every second."
This was a surprise because as insects get smaller, their aerodynamic performance decreases and to compensate, they tend to flap their wings faster.
"And this was just for hovering," Altshuler said of the bees. "They also have to transfer pollen and nectar and carry large loads, sometimes as much as their body mass, for the rest of the colony."
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. This required the bees to work harder to stay aloft and gave the scientists a chance to observe their compensation mechanisms for the additional toil.
The bees made up for the extra work by stretching out their wing stroke amplitude but did not adjust wingbeat frequency.
"They work like racing cars," Altshuler said. "Racing cars can reach higher revolutions per minute but enable the driver to go faster in higher gear. But like honeybees, they are inefficient."
The work, supervised by Caltech's Michael Dickinson, was reported last month in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists said the findings could lead to a model for designing aircraft that could hover in place and carry loads for many purposes such as diaster surveillance after earthquakes and tsunamis. They are also pleased that a simple thing like bee flight can no longer be used as an example of science failing to explain a common phenomenon.
Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can't explain everything in nature.
"People in the ID community have said that we don't even know how bees fly," Altshuler said. "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."
* Flight of the Fly
* Dancing Bees Speak in Code
* The First Biplanes Were Dinosaurs
* Secret of Bird Flight Revealed
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Re:Pfft! Why do Bees fly? (Score:1, Informative)
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
"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!
Re:Can't We All Just Get Along? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Pfft! Why do Bees fly? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why this is important (Score:3, Informative)
This is why the article mentions bees with ID (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can't We All Just Get Along? (Score:2, Informative)
That's it. No comment about who/what/whif about the designer.
Christians, however, beleive that God is the designer and that God was not created. Why do Christians beleive this? Because that is what the Bible says about God. I beleive what the Bible says - if you don't that's OK, you don't have to.
Re:Why this is important (Score:2, Informative)
The only book that I have read is titled "Case for a Creator" by Lee Strobel. (http://www.caseforacreator.com/home.php [caseforacreator.com]). What I thought good about this book is that he references lots of other books - may be a good starting point.
(I also agree with a lot of the parents that the original 'story' is a pathetic attempt at flame-baiting. Slashdot is getting pathetic and showing it's bias - final nail in the coffin of ID.. give me a break )
Re:Why this is important (Score:3, Informative)
As many have said, science and God do not have to be mutually exclusive, but people on each side are defending certain things that ARE mutually exclusive. Scientists object to the teaching of intelligent design because it's poor science. They cannot accept the teaching of it as science because it contradicts the basis on which science works. (Teaching it as a public policy or moral matter is different, but there are practical if not epistemological concerns about the fact that this could easily be construed by students and even teachers as a scientific endorsement of the ID theory.)
Some religious people object to the teaching of evolution because it contradicts fundamentally held beliefs, not just physical ones (like the idea that man is a separate creation from apes) but moral ones (that if the Bible is not literally true on the subject of creation, then its moral authority on all bases are questioned). The compromise you've reached (along with many others) is unacceptable to them.
On that point they are mutually exclusive. There are those whose moral codes are built on what they consider the strongest rock, the Bible, but which I consider to be an extremely flimsy base. Both sides are well funded and politically active. Since the moral code gives rise to a lot of public policy and law, we're going to keep having this unresolvable argument.
Re:Why this is important (Score:2, Informative)
Puhhleeze! (or, no mystery here) (Score:5, Informative)
I read about this in The Straight Dope [straightdope.com] 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.
Re:Why this is important (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can't We All Just Get Along? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why this is important (Score:2, Informative)
Creation's Tiny Mystery by Robert V. Gentry http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961675330/qid=1
Bones Of Contention: A Creationist Assessment Of Human Fossils by Marvin L. Lubenow http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801065232/qid=1
Evolution on Trial by Dr. Thomas Kindell http://kindell.nwcreation.net/biography.htm [nwcreation.net] (don't reading the excerpt; not representative)
Re:Pfft! Why do Bees fly? (Score:1, Informative)
I have personally heard this canard repeatedly from creationists. They will do it with pretty much anything that science doesn't have a ready answer to at the time. The bee one was popular because for a while it was a well-known unsolved problem that Bubba Sixpack could readily understand.
Now, of course, they've switched sides on this one. Before, the mystery of bee flight was proof of God's majestic inscrutability. Now that we've scruted it, it's proof of how darned smart God is [answersingenesis.org].
Re:The original story behind this... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:The original story behind this... (Score:1, Informative)
Actually it was nothing to do with 'biology' or 'physics'. It was an aeronautical engineer that calculated the Bumble Bee using current (1930s) aeronautical theories. There were discrepencies between the calculations and the testing results for small models used in wind tunnels and this was becoming more of a problem as the aircraft speeds were increasing with the new clean monoplane fighters (eg Spitfire).
The calculation of the Bumble Bee was to show how far out the results were on very small scales. The resolution was that the current (1930s) theories did not take into account the Reynolds Number which increases as the scale gets smaller (basically the air gets more viscous at small scales). Once the calcultions incorporated this the model and the calculations became sufficiently in agreement.
Re:Pfft! Why do Bees fly? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Science, So Called... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Perhaps because... (Score:4, Informative)
Specifically, there's a goodly list of publications that address some of his examples here [talkorigins.org]. 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.Re:Pfft! Why do Bees fly? (Score:3, Informative)
Mark 16:2-5
Matthew 28:1-3
Umm. Okay. So we're arguing about semantics.
Mark says the stone had been rolled away in the past tense, when the women weren't there, end of story. Matthew 28:2 doesn't indicate that the event happened in the present; it is also written in the past tense. Seeing as the very event caused the guards to fall unconscious, I would personally consider it unlikely that the women were there (studies have been done to indicate that women faint just as much as men do, actually... but this is a freakin' angel!). Chronologically, Matthew 28:2 belongs before Matthew 28:1.
That reconciles those two passages in my mind.
Besides, these are second-hand accounts of the same event. None of the writers witnessed any of it first-hand. I wouldn't really expect two objective writers to come up with the same account of a given historical event, but I would expect it to be accurate. We barely know what happened in Tianamen Square, for comparison. Equality and accuracy are different concepts and the fact the observations aren't equal doesn't mean the observations aren't accurate.
The Bible wasn't written by God, as in, He wasn't sitting at a desk writing the book. Most reasonable Christians believe that the different authors had the same spirit at work when they did put it on paper, or as they discussed it through oral history. The same with the choosing of which books go in. Given how well the parts of the Bible that cite each other do it, this is a logical conclusion.