• Bees May Understand Zero, a Concept That Took Humans Millennia to Grasp
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bees-may-understand-zero-concept-took-humans-millennia-grasp-180969282/ https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/7/17437640/bees-zero-math-humans-science Study: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124
bees will inherit the earth
Don't bees have to preform some pretty complex geometry while building their hives and storing honey? Granted they don't use pen and paper but they must have some understanding of space and structure.
I also find it very interesting because the concept of zero is something that may not be perceived as unusual, while in reality it really can be a very alien and advanced concept depending on how a creature's brain works.
Just in: Bee civilization collapses after a "honeycomb arrays start at 1" argument.
As cool as this is, I find this explanation more plausible - Other bee cognition experts, however, doubt that this experiment definitively proves bees get the zero concept. Clint Perry, a research fellow at the Queen Mary University of London who has spent much of his career studying bee cognition, says that there likely could be other explanations for the bees’ behavior that make him “not convinced” that bees truly are understanding the concept of zero. “The more parsimonious explanation for the results is the bees were using ‘reward history’ to solve the task—that is, how often each type of stimulus was rewarded,” Perry says. It’s possible the “less-than” bees, for example, were truly just learning that the blank panel earned them a reward 100 percent of the time, the one-shape panel 80 percent of the time, and so on. In other words, they were simply playing the best odds they could with the panels they were shown, without necessarily understanding the concept.
does this mean that other animals start their arrays ate 1?
Even bees know that arrays start at zero
"If I can't have the planet, then NOBODY can!" *rolls coal*
Are you kidding me Bees invented the goddamn hexagon before we probably even existed of course they are book smart.
No they're Genes smart. Big difference.
Though for Bees its more based on Instinct to build things like that. Which is why Humanity triumphed over the Neanderthals. We innovated, compared to the Neanderthals in which their tool making was based mostly on instinct.
Zero processing is probably much more common in the animal kingdom than we realize. Its just that animals don't understand the concept in a very intuitive or meaningful way, especially in a numerical fashion. Humans didn't develop the understanding for zero until not that long ago, around 500 A.D. in India. We didn't suddenly evolve, we've had this capability all along, we just never developed our understanding Its going to take a bit of experimentation to test animals in a meaningful way about the concept, but its very useful in the natural world so I'd be quite skeptical if it was truly that rare.
Humans understood zero under a different name - nobody thought of a way to record it though, because why record nothing
Incorrect, we had nothing as a concept before, but what makes zero special is that its a numerical understanding of nothing. To understand that nothing is less than 1 is what the breakthrough was, not the basal understanding of nothing as "lack of."
Since when did Bees wear denim?
I don't get this. What is "understanding" zero in this context? Last I checked "zero" things are omnipresent, and if you do an inventory check on something that isn't there it should be easy to understand that it isn't there.
That zero is less than one. All living things understand when something "is not there," or "lack of," but they don't really understand that nothing is less than 1. You can see this in human children even, they have a hard time getting a hold of that concept.
Actually when it comes to hivebuilding they only build the combs in tubes, then a bee goes in there with its flight muscles on overdrive, it melts the wax a bit and thus the wax relaxes into the hexagon shape as it is the most efficent shape.
It's the same reason why they don't count to 0 on space rocket countdowns. If they did count to 0 then there would be no rocket and the launch would fail.
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