The well-known honeybee "dance language" controversy concerns the very foundations of the whole field of behavior. Here, however, I deliberately deal with this controversy in a very brief form.

The following is a copy of a Letter to the Editor, which I submitted to Science on Feb.1: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Honeybee "Dance Language" Never Existed

R. Rosin

Contrary to members of the Honeybee Genome Sequencing Consortium [Nature, (2006). 443: 930-949.] the honeybee "dance language" (DL) (whose "discovery was first announced in a scientific journal in 1946) never existed. V. Frisch's DL hypothesis was simply stillborn, thanks to his first study on honeybee-recruitment (published in an extensive summary in 1923), with results that led him to fully justifiably conclude that honeybee-recruits use odor alone, and no information about the location of any food. He held on to that conclusion for more than 20 years.

Unfortunately, after the inception of his revolutionary DL hypothesis, he became erroneously convinced that the results obtained in that study were mere insignificant anomalies, not worth further mention.

Thus, for over 60 years staunch DL supporters, starting with v. Frisch himself, have persisted in an almost endless series of utterly futile attempts to experimentally confirm the stillborn DL hypothesis. This has inevitably led only to ever more intricate feats of self-delusion, often turned mass delusion. The major cause for the persistence is the erroneous belief that honeybee dancing is genetically predetermined. The honeybee DL, therefore, must exist, as the only possible solution to the problem of the adaptive value of honeybee-dances, which must be solved to avoid a severe crisis in The Theory of Evolution.

The problem of the adaptive value of honeybee-dances is simply a non-problem. The dances constitute a quantitatively complex combination of many different components, which all occur also outside the dance, and separately from one another, and most occur also in other insects. Problems of adaptive value must, therefore, be addressed to each of the components. But the combination does not have to have an additional adaptive value of its own, as a combination. [See Rosin. (2000). Amer. Bee J.,140: 98.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have entered only one correction in the original text of my Letter, which referred to an article by the "Consortium", presumably published in Science, but actually publuished in Nature.

Initially I drafted a Letter to the Editor of Science (on the same issue)in response to a Letter (by Lightfoot)actually published in Science. Then I decided, instead, to submit a Letter to the Editor of Science, (dealing with the same issue), in response to a short article (by Pennisi) also published in Science. Then I found the article by the "Consortium", and decided I had better write my Letter to the Editor of Science, in reference to the article by the "Consortium", because it was signed by very many different scientists. In all this shuffle, I failed to notice that the article by the "consortium", was not published in Science at all. It was published in Nature, instead. (The titles of the article by Pennisi in Science, and the title of the article by the "Consortium" in Nature, are very similar; which undoubtedly contributed to my confusion.) The reason I explain all this will become apparent later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The following is a response from Science, received on Feb. 6: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MS# 1140773

Dear Dr. Rosin, Thank you for sending a Letter-to-the-Editor to Science. We have read over your contribution, but will not be able to publish it in the magazine. We are letting you know as a courtesy in case you wanted to seek another outlet for your letter.

Please do not reply to this email, as it will not be read by Science. Unfortunately the volume of submissions precludes specific discussions about individual submitted letters.

Sincerely,

The Editors Science Magazine ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I find it quite amusing that the Editors of Science, who claim to have read my Letter, rejected it for reasons of space-limitation, but never even noticed that it referred to a specific article, presumably published in Science, even though Science never published such an article. Shows you how carelessly they read submitted material before rejecting it! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, a Letter to the Editor of Science is allowed only 300 words. And, since I erroneously believed I was commenting on an article published in Science, I had to pare my letter down to a maximum of 300 words. I never presented my opposition to the Nobel winning honeybee "dance language" in such a did it, inevitably excluding very many other important arguments that each alone suffices to completely discredit the honeybee "dance language" hypothesis. However, having done it, I actually like what I did, because it is extremely economical, and right to the point.

This is why I present it here. I may undertake to deal with the issue in far greater detail in the future. But this should do, quite nicely, for the time being.