The ancient Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria thought that the bees must be endowed with “a certain geometrical forethought.” And who could have given them this wisdom, but God? According to William Kirby in 1852, bees are “Heaven-instructed mathematicians.” Charles Darwin wasn’t so sure, and he conducted experiments to establish whether bees are able to build perfect honeycombs using nothing but evolved and inherited instincts, as his theory of evolution would imply. More.
Note how in pop science culture, a simple question like Why hexagons? turns into a hymn of praise to Darwin vs. others. You know, the author of the single greatest idea anyone ever had.
Incidentally, this kind of thing is what makes people like Prophet of Patheos sound so out of it. He avers that we need to combat naturalism, not Darwinism. On the scene of course, we observe that Darwinism comes unbidden to the lips and thoughts of naturalists, and is their primary means of communication, though subtle means, not-so-subtle means, and mere interruptions of thought as well. After a whle advanced stupidification sets in.
Okay, why hexagons? Now it gets interesting, a it appears to be a form of energy conservation:
If you blow a layer of bubbles on the surface of water—a so-called “bubble raft”—the bubbles become hexagonal, or almost so. You’ll never find a raft of square bubbles: If four bubble walls come together, they instantly rearrange into three-wall junctions with more or less equal angles of 120 degrees between them, like the center of the Mercedes-Benz symbol.
Evidently there are no agents shaping these rafts as bees do with their combs. All that’s guiding the pattern are the laws of physics. Those laws evidently have definite preferences, such as the bias toward three-way junctions of bubble walls. The same is true of more complicated foams. If you pile up bubbles in three dimensions by blowing through a straw into a bowl of soapy water you’ll see that when bubble walls meet at a vertex, it’s always a four-way union with angles between the intersecting films roughly equal to about 109 degrees—an angle related to the four-faceted geometric tetrahedron.
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The rules of cell shapes in foams also control some of the patterns seen in living cells. Not only does a fly’s compound eye show the same hexagonal packing of facets as a bubble raft, but the light-sensitive cells within each of the individual lenses are also clustered in groups of four that look just like soap bubbles. In mutant flies with more than four of these cells per cluster, the arrangements are also more or less identical to those that bubbles would adopt.
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The cells of many different types of organisms, from plants to lampreys to rats, contain membranes with microscopic structures like this. No one knows what they are for, but they are so widespread that it’s fair to assume they have some sort of useful role. Perhaps they isolate one biochemical process from another, avoiding crosstalk and interference. Or maybe they are just an efficient way of creating lots of “work surface,” since many biochemical processes take place at the surface of membranes, where enzymes and other active molecules may be embedded. Whatever its function, you don’t need complicated genetic instructions to create such a labyrinth: The laws of physics will do it for you. More. Cool.
The article is written as if nature in and of itself is an engineer.
Funny how, as humans come less and less to be seen as persons, nature becomes more and more so. Is there a pattern there too?
See also: Nearly 50% Americans now think humans not special What is sobering is that reduced belief in human uniqueness generally coexists with reduced interest in civil liberties, as is currently evident among millennials and especially on campuses.
See also: Nearly 50% Americans now think humans not special What is sobering is that reduced belief in human uniqueness generally coexists with reduced interest in civil liberties, as is currently evident among millennials and especially on campuses.
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This TED ED vid falls into the usual traps dicussed above: We are told that breathlessly that honeybees are “excellent mathematicians,” using hexagons.
Actually, the bees aren’t mathematicians at all, so what exactly is the source of the mathematics? As one commenter puts it, “It sounds like the bees actually choose the exagon. Do birds migrate to the south because they’ve seen some advertisement on TV??” The commenter’s point is well-taken, though mistaken by later commenters. The bees do not know why the hexagon works and did not hit on the idea after failed experiments with squares and pentagons.