What Does The Honeybee See? And How Do We Know?: A Critique Of Scientific Reason
by Adrian Horridge /
2011 / English / PDF
6.7 MB Download
This book is the only account of what the bee, as an example of an
insect, actually detects with its eyes. Bees detect some visual
features such as edges and colours, but there is no sign that they
reconstruct patterns or put together features to form objects. Bees
detect motion but have no perception of what it is that moves, and
certainly they do not recognize “things” by their shapes. Yet they
clearly see well enough to fly and find food with a minute brain.
Bee vision is therefore relevant to the construction of simple
artificial visual systems, for example for mobile robots. The
surprising conclusion is that bee vision is adapted to the
recognition of places, not things. In this volume, Adrian Horridge
also sets out the curious and contentious history of how bee vision
came to be understood, with an account of a century of neglect of
old experimental results, errors of interpretation, sharp
disagreements, and failures of the scientific method. The design of
the experiments and the methods of making inferences from
observations are also critically examined, with the conclusion that
scientists are often hesitant, imperfect and misleading, ignore the
work of others, and fail to consider alternative explanations. The
erratic path to understanding makes interesting reading for anyone
with an analytical mind who thinks about the methods of science or
the engineering of seeing machines.
This book is the only account of what the bee, as an example of an
insect, actually detects with its eyes. Bees detect some visual
features such as edges and colours, but there is no sign that they
reconstruct patterns or put together features to form objects. Bees
detect motion but have no perception of what it is that moves, and
certainly they do not recognize “things” by their shapes. Yet they
clearly see well enough to fly and find food with a minute brain.
Bee vision is therefore relevant to the construction of simple
artificial visual systems, for example for mobile robots. The
surprising conclusion is that bee vision is adapted to the
recognition of places, not things. In this volume, Adrian Horridge
also sets out the curious and contentious history of how bee vision
came to be understood, with an account of a century of neglect of
old experimental results, errors of interpretation, sharp
disagreements, and failures of the scientific method. The design of
the experiments and the methods of making inferences from
observations are also critically examined, with the conclusion that
scientists are often hesitant, imperfect and misleading, ignore the
work of others, and fail to consider alternative explanations. The
erratic path to understanding makes interesting reading for anyone
with an analytical mind who thinks about the methods of science or
the engineering of seeing machines.
