This critique raises some interesting points: http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quantum.php http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bee

This critique raises some interesting points: http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quantum.php http://www.ortholog.com/archive/in_response/bees_arent_quant... """... Just because it takes a lot of maths doesn't mean it isn't easy to do. Mathematics is a (formal language for the) description of events, not the other way round. Take integration for example, the mathematical operation of finding the integral e.g. finding the area under a curve specified by a quadratic equation. There are humans with 1.75kg of brain tissue that can't do that, so it must be hard, right? However, it takes just a handful of electronic components to devise a circuit that outputs the integral. Can we really say for certain that there isn't a simple enough circuit you can build out of bee neurones to compute the angles encoded in the waggle dance? Of course not. It was recently shown by Elbing and coworkers that we can build some electronic components from single molecules. It isn't intrinsically hard; it's just hard to write down. A bee doesn't need "equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world"; it just needs visual acuity and some simple circuitry. Well, two circuits. First, an encoder that takes inputs from its primitive memory, recently stimulated by the food discovery and the excited journey home noting sun/horizon landmarks, and outputs the dance. And secondly, a decoder to recognise the dance before its cute little compound eyes and compute the relevant angles for navigation. It sounds complicated but it isn't. Consider this: how complex are the mathematical operations required for a human to catch a thrown ball? Pretty complex and likely to take up a lot of paper--but, crucially, they don't take up a lot of brain circuitry if such things can, after Elbing (or more properly, billions of years before Elbing), be built of a handful of molecules. Just because a rational, sentient, conscious process struggles to achieve a thing doesn't make it a hard thing to do. Doing is easier than computing, for most values of "do" and "compute"."""