A Bee with Personality

Science has driven yet another nail into the coffin of human uniqueness. (See Bee genes may drive them to adventure.)

Pretty ‘soon’ (a thousand years from now?) we’re going to have to admit that, while we see ourselves as unique, we are actually overwhelmingly similar to ‘lesser’ creatures.

There’s that old profound sameness again. Anything that will pull us back to more humility would be a return toward sanity.

The Science News article describes how researchers found out some underlying motivational forces that effect how bees forage. Here are the concluding few paragraphs:

The work suggests that evolution may use the same genetic toolkit across species for behavioral traits, much in the way that related genes are used for building body parts, whether in a fruit fly or frog.

And the work adds to growing evidence that humans aren’t the only species that have personalities.

“If you ask people if they think a squid has personality, they usually say no,” says psychologist Sam Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin. But individual squid, and apparently bees, may consistently seek new things. In animals, scientists call that “novelty-seeking,” while people who exhibit similar traits get labels like “extrovert.”

Without the ‘in-your-face’ rigorous honesty that the scientific process encourages, we’d be merrily rolling along with our species-ego-centric rationalizations for our superiority…  God’s gift to creation 😉