This week’s statement is surprisingly complicated, because it comprises a variety of misconceptions in less than ten words.  I was planning on covering the much more straightforward statement Science Cannot Explain How Bees Fly, but, after some quick googling, I found that the titular statement is actually a much more common take on the subject.  Indeed, this is the way Mike Huckabee phrased it, comparing his tireless campaigning despite meager polling results to the naïve bee defying those pesky scientific facts.  Huckabee eventually succumbed to those polls, but the noble bee flies on.

The way I see it, this statement raises three questions for the skeptic to address.  Does science not understand bee flight?  If not, do scientists declare bee flight to be impossible?  And lastly, does not being aware of a law of nature let you defy it?  In a word raised to the third power, No^3.

Pffft, Yeah, Maybe If Bees Could Fly ...

The precise origin of the notion that bees cannot fly is apparently lost in the sands of pseudoscientific time (pseudotime?).  If an explanation is provided, it seems to be something like the following: an airplane the size of a bee could not fly at the speeds that bees buzz around.  This seems pretty reasonable to me.  I’m no aerospace engineer, but I can’t imagine the slow speed of a bumblebee generating enough fixed-wing lift to keep our imagined bee-plane aloft.  Of course, bees flap their wings, so we shouldn’t expect an airplane to be an apt analogy.

Now, you didn’t think a good piece of false folk wisdom would die that easily, did you?  Of course not, so all sorts of problems with bee flight have been concocted to keep this notion alive.  Sure bees might flap their wings and solve the above problem, but they don’t have a rudder so they’d spin out of control!  Sure bees flap their wings, but there’s no way they can flap them fast enough to fly!  Sure the lame argument above could be used to “explain” that helicopters can’t fly, but helicopter blades are curvy and bees’ wings are flat!

Coincidentally, some of the points those fabricated problems stumbled upon are actually relevant.  For instance, bees’ wings do indeed flap about ten times faster than their nerve impulses fire; the trick is that their muscles are vibrating rather than truly flapping, per se.  In addition, the bee rotates its wings drastically during each flap, cutting through the previous stroke’s wake and creating some serious vortices (eddies).  Via this rapid flapping and fancy wing rotation, bees are able to generate all the lift they need to happily buzz around.

Bee flight is definitely complex; heck, scientists at Caltech are building robotic model bees and publishing papers about the details of insect flight to this very day.  But, no sober scientist worth his salt should have ever looked at an airplane and said “if this was as small as a bee it wouldn’t fly ... oh my god, we don’t know how bees fly!”  Some websites speculate that this all might have started out as an inside joke gone awry, or perhaps some overzealous biologists getting excited that they stumped a hard scientist this one time.  Regardless, we know how bees fly.

But, Even If We Didn’t Know How Bees Fly ...

Onto the second pseudoscientific angle of this week’s statement: that scientists would ever declare bee flight impossible.  This flows out of the statement above pretty well, but when you take a step back it’s a pretty ridiculous suggestion.  We have overwhelming evidence that bees can fly.  There are over twenty thousand species of bee living on every continent except Antarctica.  According to Wikipedia, every single habitat containing insect-pollinated plants has bees, and every single species of bee can fly.

Thus, a scientist should never claim that bee flight is impossible.  Experimental observation is half the story in science, and declaring bee flight impossible would be in direct conflict with tons of available data.  Anyone imagining that science would say such a thing is really missing the point of science.  Let’s pretend for a moment that we have no idea whatsoever how bees manage to fly.  It’s a total mystery, and scientists everywhere are completely befuddled by the bee flight problem.  The appropriate scientific statement to make would be that “we don’t understand how bees fly.”  Note the recognition that bees do fly, as this is what observation tells us.  It would never be deemed impossible, since we see it happening every day.

Wouldn’t you know it; this is precisely the route pseudo-science takes when it encounters something it cannot explain.  Take my favorite pseudoscientists, creationists.  They cannot explain the existence of so-called transitional species, so they deny their existence outright.  They declare transitional forms impossible, since their “theory”* cannot account for them.  Thus, a fossil between snakes and other reptiles isn’t a transitional form to a creationist; it’s a snake with legs or a reptile with a snake-like body.  Actual scientists don’t get to pull stunts like this.

*God, how it pains me to honor their blather with that term.  Is there a good word for pseudo-theory?  You know, besides bullshit, of course.

Can Ignorance Be That Blissful?

Part three of the titular statement manages to be even worse than the first two.  You can’t fault someone for not knowing the scientific explanation for bee flight, and accusing scientists of denying evidence to fit their theories is pretty bad but not too hard to imagine someone doing.  But, this last part is a doozy.

Let’s continue our make-believe game from above: pretend scientists cannot explain bee flight.  So, in this hypothetical situation, how can bees fly?  The appropriate response is a simple I dunno.  However, the answer you’re getting from someone making this week’s statement is because they don’t know the laws of physics.  Thus, the person is claiming that not knowing the rules by which the universe behaves allows you to break those rules.

Think about that for a minute.  This person is saying that bees are flying via the power of their own ignorance.  According to this statement, if some paragon bee looked around and figured out some basic physics principles, it would drop out of the sky like a stone.  This is quite literally magical thinking.  Amnesiacs should be able to fly out of their hospital room windows or walk through walls, at least until they figure out that they shouldn’t be able to.

Such a sentiment belies something profound about the person holding it, assuming they actually mean it and aren’t just blithely reciting the titular statement after reading it somewhere.  I wouldn’t even call it pseudoscientific; magical really is the best word for it.  If you think an animal can defy gravity because it doesn’t know about gravity, then you believe in magic.

This slice of the titular statement also has some anti-scientific connotation.  It implies that science ruins all the fun, so to speak.  If we weren’t such inherently good scientists and we stayed ignorant of physics like those lesser beasts, we could probably fly just like they do.  Damn you and your rules, science!

I hate to wax psychologic about the imaginary person I’m envisioning making this week’s statement, but I think this sentiment is telling.  It’s as if the person is lamenting the woo-of-the-gaps forced upon them by science.  Back in the good old days, astrology and sacrifices to minor gods worked great.  Then science came along with its white lab coats and beakers and procedures, and spoiled everything for everyone!

Science Is the Bee’s Knees!

As I mentioned early on, we had an action-packed nine words this week.  Indeed, I managed to spin a 1400+ word yarn out of it; that’s a 150-fold return on word investment.  I’ve been meaning to do an entry about the importance of this kind of inquiry in skepticism, and next time would definitely be prudent.  Of course, it also would’ve been a good idea to write about the tryptophan in turkey making you sleepy around Thanksgiving, as opposed to merely thinking about what a good idea that would be.  Ah well.

Back to bee flight, the titular statement is about as wrong as you can get.  Science does have a handle on bee flight, scientists would never declare bee flight impossible per the obvious evidence for it, and unawareness of physics does not let you defy gravity.  The first part is probably an honest mistake or oversight, the middle part is a pretty serious misunderstanding or misrepresentation of science, and the end forces you to question just how reality-based the person’s worldview is(n’t).  As it turns out, ignorance can’t be used to generate power.  If only it could …