Astral Codex Ten

Karl von Frisch

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Karl von Frisch

Article

Karl von Frisch is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 22, 2021 and August 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “As the early experimentalist Karl von Frisch poetically put it”; “The ‘waggle dance’ was discovered by Karl von Frisch”; “Karl von Frisch observed that some bees were very picky about the sweetness of foods”. It most often appears alongside ACX, African Gray Parrots, Anil Seth.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 22, 2021
  • Last seen: August 18, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?
April 22, 2021 · Original source
In the past, some humans have certainly been overly ready to attribute human thoughts, feelings, and experiences to animals (okay, not just the past - I certainly anthropomorphize my cats much more than I should), but for much of the twentieth century, many biologists went too far and would deny any human-like characteristics to animals, reaching an extreme by importing Skinnerian "black box" thinking that denied any speculation about the mental or emotional life of animals. De Waal argues that both anthropomorphization and "anthropodenial" (the rejection of any shared mental or emotional traits between humans and animals) have led to missed opportunities for observation, experiment and study. The twin pillars of modern animal cognition study are both evolutionary: fundamental continuity and adaptation to niches. In other words, much of what underlies various kinds of cognition is retained from common ancestors, but each animal species has specialized cognition to help them survive in their particular circumstances. As the early experimentalist Karl von Frisch poetically put it, each animal species seems to have a "magic well" - an area of specialized behavior that keeps giving new insights the longer you look. The "magic well" gives the antidote to human exceptionalism in animal cognition: lots of animals are "exceptional" in particular flavors of cognition - including humans, whose magic well is speech and symbolic thought. Given this, De Waal proposes a reasonable heuristic for how comfortable we should be inferring human-like thoughts or feelings: the closer an animal species is related to humans, the more reasonable it is that they might think and feel like we do, and the further the relation, the less reasonable. Crazy idea, right?
Your Book Review: The Mind Of A Bee
August 18, 2023 · Original source
The ‘waggle dance’ was discovered by Karl von Frisch in the months after the end of World War II. Frisch worked in Nazi Germany during the war. Frisch was fractionally Jewish and his colleagues accused him of “bigoted opposition towards antisemitism” in his writings. He seems to have bowed to the pressure, penning a nasty tract on “racial hygiene” and recommending sterilisation of mentally unwell people. A charitable interpretation of these events would argue that he hoped to protect himself and other Jewish researchers by doing so.
In another example, Karl von Frisch observed that some bees were very picky about the sweetness of foods they would tolerate, and (many years later) Robert Page and others found that differences in sensitivity to sugar are present when bees are hours old, and determine whether they become pollen or nectar foragers.
Inline links: found that