Articles

The Honeybee and the Supercomputer

by Anonymous

The facts about the bee's anatomy related herein are not controversial, but are common knowledge and easily accessible on the internet. The controversial issue is not the facts, but the implication of the facts.

The Bee's Brain

Let us compare the brain of a honeybee to a supercomputer. The brain of the honeybee is superior to the supercomputer computer by several orders of magnitude.  The supercomputer can compute at the rate of one billion computations per second. The honeybee's brain can compute one billion computations in 1/1000 of a second. (1)

Think about that for a moment. A billion organized and purposeful computations in less time that it takes to blink. And that is a bee, not a human. If this is true, how could this be the result of chance mutations and the survival of the fittest?  How does evolution explain computing power of this magnitude? Here is a photograph of evolution's answer to how small insects like bees acquired brains the size of pinheads that perform calculations at the rate of one billion computations in 1/1000 of a second:

The Bee's Vision

A major portion of the bee's processing power is dedicated to vision. One portion of this vision is providing the bee with ultraviolet light vision. The purpose for ultraviolet light vision is to enable other portions of the bee's brain to quickly distinguish between flowers with pollen and flowers without pollen (this distinction is easily made with ultraviolet light).

Another function of the bee's processing power is to provide other portions of the bee's brain with an extremely wide, super-fast, moving image encompassing both sides of the bee simultaneously. The speed of resolution and refresh of the bee's vision is significantly faster than that of humans. For instance, if a bee were to see a motion picture, it would not see motion; it would see a series of still photographs.

This is accomplished through the bee's compound eye that contains thousands of tiny lenses encased in minute hexagonal chambers that admit only light that is directly in line with the direction of the lens. The purpose of this super-fast visual processing is to enable the bee to fly quickly through dense forests and avoid collisions with leaves or to fly in a swarm of other bees and avoid collisions with them.

It is ludicrous to argue that random mutations slowly developed the eyes, that billions of neurons in the Bee's brain slowly came together in just the right way to provide the processing power for ultraviolet light and that this ability was perpetuated because ultraviolet light perception happens to coincide with pollinated flowers and was advantageous to the bees that had it?

It is equally ludicrous to argue that billions of unobserved accidental mutations (that are no longer occurring) slowly developed blazingly fast compound eyes, developed the codes to transfer the images from each separate microscopic lens the compound eye and simultaneously developed the neuroprocessing power to read, assimilate, analyze and react to those codes at the rate of 1 billion computations in 1/1000 of a second all because all of the bees that did not have this ability had to fly too slow and died?

That is no explanation.

The primary reason why many scientists believe that mutations and dying bees created computers the size of pinheads that compute like this is because the more reasonable explanation ( the Creator ) is simply not acceptable to them. For these scientists, their science is not founded upon observation; it is founded upon an impenetrable theological conclusion.

The eye of the honeybee is a marvel of hyper-complexity with thousands of microscopic lenses providing extremely rapid image translation in order to enable instant reactions to close objects. Note the protective hairs on the eye: each one positioned in the line with sight of the nearest hexagonal lenses, so as not to obstruct the bee's vision. Consider the compound eye that is designed for hyper-fast reaction; consider the even distribution and alignment of thousands of lenses and the superior processing power of a brain the size of a pinhead. These are not accidents. This is no haphazard grouping of mutations. This was intended; it was designed.

1.  Sejnowski, T.J. and Churchland, P.S., 1992, Byte Magazine, October, 1992, p. 137. Sejnowski and Churchland are well recognized in the field of neurobiology and in the field of computational neuroscience and are professors at the University of California . See also Sejnowski, T.J. and Churchland, P.S. The Computational Brain (MIT Press, 1992), p. 9 (Wherein the authors state that "the brain of the common housefly, for example, performs 1011 operations per second when merely resting."). Use any large search engine such as Google to review the works and credentials of P.S. Churchland and T.J. Sejnowski.

http://www.creationdesign.org/Honeybee.html