ECOLOGY 277 



out saying that such animals are better adapted to life in caves than they 

 would be outside. One pressing problem of biology is: How did the cave 

 animals become blind? Did' they wander into the caves as normal animals 

 and become blind because their eyes were disused, or did they become 

 blind outside through no fault of their own, as a result of a mutation, and 

 by chance find safety in an underground stream or cave? The first explana- 

 tion is Lamarckian, the second Darwinian. 



Adaptations are characteristic of all living organisms and must be ac- 

 counted for by any evolutionary theory that is to be acceptable. Any 

 theory that claims to account for new species but does not account for 

 adaptations is at best only a partial explanation. 



BEES RAISE QUESTIONS * 

 HENRY S. CONARD 



In many ways, the behavior of bees suggests our own ways. Old bee- 

 keepers always attribute to their pets the will, the motives, the emotions 

 that they recognize in themselves. Bee-keepers speak of bees in the lan- 

 guage of human conduct. 



In comparing bees and men certain factors should be borne in mind. 

 From the evolutionary standpoint, we are of course very distantly related 

 to bees, but our common ancestry is not nearer than the segmented worms 

 or perhaps the Cambrian Eurypterids which lived 100 or perhaps 1,000 

 million years ago. A common origin of our protoplasm explains perhaps 

 the similarities between bees and men in their cruder chemical and physical 

 structure, and even in the muscles, nerves, skin, digestive tracts and body 

 fluids. Both man and bees are made up of proteins, fats and carbohydrates; 

 our active tissues are all protein in nature; we store excess food in our 

 bodies as fat (insects are very oily); we consume carbohydrates and oxi- 

 dize them for release of energy. We all get our protein and carbohydrate 

 from the plant world, and give it back to the plants during life, as water, 

 carbon dioxide and nitrogenous wastes, and at death our bodies return to 

 dust. There is little reason to think that our common ancestor was capable 

 of experiencing any of the appetites or emotions that we know in ourselves, 

 although Jennings does assert that if the amoeba could be seen and known 

 as we see and know dogs, we should attribute to the lowest animal organism 

 known to science "states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, of desire, and the 

 like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute these things to the dog." 



Man and the honey-bee are, however, so profoundly different in most 

 respects that we might almost regard them as inhabitants of different 



• Reprinted by permission of the Scientific Monthly, American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science. Copyright 1940. 



