From: "Richard" (rcarlson@olympus.net)
Date: July 30, 2005 1:50:03 PM PDT
To: rjon@vzavenue.net
Subject: Re: Four Functions Chart
Reply-To: postaum2005@sriaurobindocenter-la.com

Hi Don

I'd be curious to know what type methodology which you are applying to this research concerning ranges of animal consciousness? Also if this is part of your research (if not then please ignore) how would you account for those extraordinary migratory phenomena found among animals,
insects, and fish, for example:

- the ability of successive generations of birds, butterflies, salmon, etc to travel thousands of miles along the same course to find their way to and from the exact same places year after year? And the extraordinary ability of seemingly inconscient creatures such as bacteria to perform astonishing seemingly impossible evolutionary adaptive feats,

- or for that matter
for bees to display the ability to make seemingly mathematical
calculations in experiments such as the one posted below?

rich
_____________

dish
A. The bees of hive A obediently followed their pre-trained scouts.
Despite the high caloric content of the second dish, all ignored it and
drank only from the "pre-approved" container, carrying drops of its
contents back to their home base. The bees in the second hive were
tricked by the same technique into following the leader and visiting
only dish B. There was no significant number of deviants in either
hive. In a very real sense, the bees had been transformed from a chaos
of individuals to a single mind. Their transmuter: imitative learning.

The
result is capable of remarkable "mental" feats. I described in my book,
The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of
history, an experiment in which apian flyers were given an inadvertent
group IQ test. A dish of sweetened-water was placed outside the hive.
The bees soon found it and, following the leader, concentrated their
collective attention on mining every glucose molecule within it. The
next day, the dish was moved to a location twice as far from the hive.
The bees used two of those tricks which make a group brain
function-hierarchy and task specialization-to pinpoint the new target
area. While the mass of followers clung meekly to their honeycombs, a
handful of "independent thinkers" flew about at will, testing one spot
then another for food. The division of labor soon resulted in the
discovery of the sugar dish's location. Now the herd instinct which
results from imitative learning took over. The sheep-like multitude
followed those who had made the find and combined their efforts to
exploit the food source for all it was worth.

The following day,
the experimenters once again set the dish twice as far from the hive as
on the previous occasion. And once again the scouts fanned out, a
myriad of eyes and antennae gathering input for a collective mind. Once
again the dish was spotted and the herd of follower bees swarmed to
maximize their prize.

Then came the part that astonished the
researchers. Each day they doubled the distance from dish to hive. The
flight path's length followed a simple arithmetic progression. After
several days the swarm no longer waited for its scouts to return with
news of the latest coordinates. Instead, when experimenters arrived to
set down the sugar water, they found the bees had preceded them. Like
multiple transistors crowded on the chip of a pocket calculator, the
massed bees had predicted the next step in a mathematical series. But
unlike the electronic calculator, they had perceived the existence of
that series without the aid of a human pushing buttons.