A Conversation with an Orb WeaverHere we go again. Barely back from the world tour of the Singing Mummy of Leeds, scientists are again making a mockery out of science. It seems like every day in the news we get a story like this. I can’t even begin to keep up with them all.
There are things in our world that genuinely need to be studied in order to solve real-world problems, things that can improve the human condition, things that can save the planet.
Isn’t there a master list somewhere that the scientific community uses to keep track of all those things that really do need to be studied? Even though it would be a very long list, talking to spiders would not be on it. Do you want to be a real, grown-up scientist? Pick a field of study from the list, one that can help solve problems that affect our tenuous grasp on existence.
Before we get started, I offer this explanatory note regarding terminology: Throughout this article, I refer to the author of the spider research paper as “scientist,” and “researcher.” He is neither. I also refer to the concepts of “science” and “research.” Neither of those occurred.
In this latest miscarriage of science, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is talking to spiders. Well, he’s not really ‘talking’ to them. His goal is to communicate with them, but his methodology is dubious, and he has conducted absolutely no preliminary research.
Unless you have one named Charlotte, a spider won’t talk to you anyway. Spiders know that any involvement with humans is a potential death sentence for their own species. That outcome has been borne out too many times to count.
As you’ll soon see, this researcher’s tinkering isn’t science at all. It’s just an easy way for a mediocre researcher to get his name published. It’s in the same vein as ‘even bad publicity is still publicity.’ It is no different from a kid filming himself rolling off the roof in a shopping cart and posting it on You Tube.
However, unlike the MIT scientist, the shopping-cart kid did get actual scientific results: He hit the ground—evidence of gravity; and his substantial injuries are proof that blunt-force trauma can hurt like hell. Not to mention a million views on You Tube.
If you have perused any scientific research papers, you probably suspect, sometimes just from the title, many are frivolous, shallow, and meritless.
In order to fully appreciate the absurdity of this research, you must read the researcher’s own words.
“Spiders have very keen vibrational sensors, they use vibrations to orient themselves, to communicate with other spiders and so the idea of thinking literally like a spider would experience the world was something that was very obvious to us as spider material scientists.”
Simply for the sake of argument, we’ll call that pile of words a sentence, but don’t bother reading it again. It won’t make any more sense the second time. It’s gibberish, scientifically and grammatically.
Nonetheless, it fairly accurately reflects the nature of the entire study, and sets the stage for what follows.
He continues: “We’re beginning to perhaps be able to speak the language of the spider. The hope is that we can . . . communicate with the spider.”My use of the ellipsis does not indicate the omission of any material information, nor any scientific jargon that was over my head. It was just more gibberish.
We humans cannot communicate effectively with any other species on the planet, intelligent or otherwise. We can’t even talk with other animals that communicate using vocalizations. We coaxed a gorilla to communicate using sign language. It is fascinating, but it’s not much more advanced than “Sit,” “Roll over,” or “Polly want a cracker?” And it wasn’t easy—or quick.
In the 50 years following, it has not led to any communication between humans and gorillas, or any other species.
I am still waiting for an answer to “Who’s a good puppy?”
Dolphins are considered to be highly intelligent. If we could effectively communicate with a dolphin, we might ask it, “How do you like living in the kiddie pool at Sea World?” Or perhaps, “Why do you idiots strand yourselves on beaches?” Who wouldn’t want to know those answers? Instead, we teach them tricks. You can teach tricks to a grasshopper.
Just because you are doing an activity in a laboratory, it does not automatically make it science.
Let’s take a look at how one MIT scientist is going about this latest affront to the scientific method.
First, he scanned a spider’s web, and using a computer program, transformed the image into a 3D, virtual reality web. He then randomly assigned musical notes to arbitrarily chosen strands of the virtual web. Those notes had nothing to do with the natural vibrations of the web. Then he created a synthesizer voice to use for the sounds. That voice also had nothing to do with either the spider or the web. It was chosen for its creepiness, simply to entertain a human audience. Hollywood!
As the researcher interacts with the web in the virtual-reality environment of the computer program the sounds are triggered.
“In addition to the scientific value, the webs are musically interesting, and you can hear the melodies the spider creates during construction. It’s unusual and eerie and scary.” The scientist almost nailed syntax this time, if not science.
He mentioned the scientific value only in passing because there is no scientific value to mention. It’s eerie sounding only because he created an eerie-sounding synthesizer patch. None of this has anything to do with the spider or the web. He could have just as easily used Christmas bells instead of the 1950’s-science-fiction-movie sound effect. The spider did not create the melodies or the sounds; the researcher did.
It became quite apparent that, besides not being a real scientist, he’s not a musician either.
I think back to my childhood when I used to play with my father’s tools. I didn’t always use them properly, or for the purpose for which they were intended. Pretending was fun, and I am now very competent using those tools. Some of us grew up.
The researcher was certainly not communicating with the spider. He was not even on a viable path toward that goal. As we saw, he was challenged just trying to communicate with the interviewer.
You can talk to sand. Anyone can, in any language. But does the sand understand what you are saying? Can it respond? Will it help to invent a language by putting music to the individual grains? Can the sand sing you an answer? Can one grain speak for the whole beach, or do they elect a representative?
Okay, that was a silly diversion. The sand will never take you seriously enough to respond.I understand the concept. Sound is vibration, and spiders can detect and react to certain vibrations.
One of the measures of a sound’s characteristics is the frequency of the vibrations, measured in hertz (Hz), or cycles per second. Humans can generally hear sounds in the 20 to 20,000 Hz range. If a sound is loud enough, and within that frequency range, we can hear it. Sometimes if it is loud enough, we can feel it even if it vibrates outside those frequencies. That’s another measure: volume, or amplitude.Many animals can produce and hear, or otherwise detect many frequencies that we humans can’t.
Spiders cannot hear anything in the traditional sense. They have no ears. But they can feel the vibrations through their legs and through the tiny hairs on their bodies. They can feel vibrations that travel through the air, the ground, and vibrations that travel through their webs. Most of those vibrations are too weak for us to hear or feel.
A spider’s web will vibrate in response to many stimuli. The spider can feel a vibration, and react appropriately, somehow discerning whether it is caused by a breeze, another spider, a prey animal stuck in its web, raindrops, or a kid poking a stick at it. It isn’t communication; it’s simply observing and reacting. Much of that reaction is purely instinct.
The web will vibrate differently depending upon the stimulus, just as a guitar string will vibrate differently when plucked with a pick rather than a finger. And it sounds different if it’s played with a bow. Sound is fickle. It’s also very specific.
So, although he may have been on to something regarding a spider’s ability to ‘read’ vibrations, the researcher did not use the natural vibrations a spider might experience. He did not vibrate the actual web structures. He invented his own vibrations, totally unrelated to the spider and her web. And he did not subject the subject (the spider) to those vibrations.
And it was all done in a computer.
The ‘music’—the vibration—that the researcher produced was completely outside the range of what the spider’s web would have made, and what the spider would have ever experienced. If played for the actual spider, she could have detected it, but she would likely have no way to process it in a way that was useful to her, other than possibly perceiving it as a threat or just ignoring it as a nuisance noise. It would never be recognized by the spider as communication.
We humans can’t hear those tiny vibrations the spider is accustomed to, but a spider can also detect and process many sounds that are well within our own audible frequency range, sounds like the buzz of flapping insect wings, or the chirping of predatory birds. But just a frequency is not enough to identify a source.
That’s because there is more to sound than just the frequency and volume.
A piano can play the note A above middle C. That frequency is 440 Hz. A guitar can also play A, but it sounds very different, even though they are both string instruments. Virtually all musical instruments can play the same A, and all will sound different; the vibrations, though the same frequency, are a different shape, a different wave form. Lots of other non-musical things can make the same note.
A spider can ‘hear’ all those sounds too, but she has no clue what they are. She has no real need to know. Can a spider “know” anything?If you hear the note A, you can probably tell whether the source is a piano or a guitar. It might even be a car horn, or the wind whistling through the leaves, or the clinking of a glass at a wedding. You can usually tell. But it could be a sound you have never experienced, like the researcher’s synthesizer patch, even if it’s still the very familiar A above middle C.
Frequency, volume, wave form. Now we add harmonics, the subtle interactions of all the qualities.
Virtually no sounds in nature consist of just one pure note or waveform. Sounds are complex mixtures of many qualities, including the acoustics of the local environment.
If the spider’s normal prey flaps its wings at 440 Hz, and you play an A note on a piano, will the spider attempt to make meal of the piano? (It’s not necessarily science, but it sure would be entertaining to watch on You Tube.)
Communicating with spiders through music is probably a dead end. Communicating with spiders is probably a dead end.
Would communicating with music work with a more intelligent species?
How about birds? Some bird species are very intelligent, notably members of the crow family, being able to solve complex problems that leave many humans stymied.
Birds chirp and sing to communicate, so you might have a better chance talking to them with your music. You’ll need an interpreter, because even if you whistle the notes of a bird’s song exactly, the bird will probably ignore it.
She can tell that you’re not a bird, the same way you can tell the difference if a note is played on a guitar string or a trumpet. It just sounds different, for all the reasons mentioned earlier.
It’s probably just as well. Someone could be walking through the park, innocently whistling an innocuous tune that is overheard—and tragically misinterpreted—by a murder of crows. It would be Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds all over again.
And making music from a spider web? Nothing will ever understand that. Not the spider. Not the researcher. Not the crows.
The scientist could have avoided all this frivolous nonsense, and he could have avoided the humiliation of publishing an embarrassing scientific paper, if he had done some preliminary research. Number two on his list (number one was to choose something useful) would be doing some research into the nature of sound. Vibrations are the essence of his experiment, and he doesn’t seem to have even a basic understanding of the physics of sound.
It would also make sense for the researcher to first do an experiment by using two subjects of the same species and build a song based upon something they are both familiar with. Humans and spiders do not communicate with each other, so you have no idea if you’re getting through to them or not. What if the spider does completely understand, but just doesn’t know how to respond, or simply chooses not to?
You would never know it.
Just for fun, let’s do our own experiment. This one is easy to do. The results are immediate, and best of all, it is real science. Don’t do this at home though. No, it isn’t dangerous. It’s just a pointless waste of time.
We’ll start with two members of the same species, human, but who speak different languages. Each person does not know the other’s language. We have a head start in this experiment, because with a translator, we can talk to both subjects about their experience. We will know what they were thinking.
We will know whether there was any communication.
Subject A, who speaks American English, wants to communicate with Subject B. Subject B speaks Vietnamese. Neither speaks nor understands the other’s language.
There are some concepts that are not too difficult to convey between people who speak different languages. If I were in a foreign land, I could probably find a public restroom, or a place to eat lunch using hand gestures or drawing pictures. So, for our experiment, we’ll choose a different, but very simple concept for our message: “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Although there appears to be some communication, Subject A is getting nowhere with the hand gestures and pictures. He decides to try the universal language of music. So, he invents a song, and plays her the composition on his harmonica.
Subject B finally responds: “Tôi không bi?t b?n dang nói gì, nhung âm nh?c c?a b?n r?t hay.” (“I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, but your music sucks! “)
Subject A plays on, unaware of the nature of Subject B’s response.
The results are immediate and easy to interpret: One species; Three languages; Zero communication.
That makes for an exciting scientific paper. I should have no problem getting that paper published. I might even get an interview with Not Quite Science Weekly.
Meanwhile, the planet gets warmer.
If two people who speak two very different languages cannot communicate, how will it help to invent a third language, music, that neither one understands?
You could even conduct the musical portion of the experiment with two people who speak the same language. The results would be identical. It’s not surprising.
Even if our unfortunate, unintelligent, experimental spider ‘understood’ that she was building a web, how would she understand that the researcher’s made-up music was supposed to have anything to do with it? The scientist himself had no idea at all what he was trying to say to her with the music he invented.
We’ll forget about the music dead end with the spider. But what about those simple vibrations the spider is accustomed to? Could we start there and forget about the fantasy 3-D virtual world?
Getting back to those basics, the researcher can probably simulate the vibrations of a moth stuck in a web. He might be able to fool the spider. That’s mimicry. It happens all the time in nature. You can do it with a stick.
Under the proper conditions, that would be science, if the researcher had done it. But he didn’t, and it’s still not communication.
However, if the researcher vibrated the web in such a way as to inform the spider that at 2:30pm tomorrow a juicy bug will be placed on the web at a specific location, and the spider did show up at that time and place wearing a bib, that would be evidence of communication. You can’t do that with a stick—or a piano.
The main thing to remember about this project is that it took place completely in virtual reality. What is virtual reality? Fake. The whole thing was made up and produced in a computer program! The actual spider was not used in any capacity in the research. The only thing having to do with the spider was an image of a spider’s web, not even the actual web.
At no point during the project were actual web vibrations from a spider’s actions detected, measured or analyzed. At no point were a spider’s reactions to researcher-induced web vibrations detected, measured or analyzed in any way. The spider’s only involvement was making a web. Everything after that was fantasy.
There was no science involved. There was no research. There was no experimentation. There was no hypothesis. There was no theory. There were no variables. There was no I’ll-do-this-and-compare-what-happens-to-what-happens-when-I-do-that.
In short, considering the whole purpose was communicating with a spider, there was no spider involved, beyond the web that was photographed only for a starting image. No one tried at any time to communicate with a spider, or to listen to what the spider had to say, either directly, or through the web. It was an art project at best.Perhaps it was performance art. Some elements of music were involved, but nothing resembling music was produced, contrary to the researcher’s assertions.
An artist’s self-absorbed, pretentious description of his masterpiece does not belong in a scientific paper.
Real scientists don’t understand how spiders communicate with each other. It seems like that would be a better place to start, rather than randomly inventing some new language that no one uses or understands. We know nothing more now about how a spider communicates than we did at the beginning of the research. You can talk to a spider, but you cannot have a conversation. We knew that.
You can send an idiot to college, but you can’t make him a scientist. Quit trying. It’s time for high school councilors to start doing their jobs by directing some of these people to trade schools. If the world had more plumbers, they wouldn’t be so expensive, and it wouldn’t take two weeks to get one out to unclog my toilet.
Update: Perhaps I was wrong. Was I too hasty in my criticism of MIT’s Scientific Method for Dummies? The scientist eventually did receive a response from the spider.As he entered his lab one morning and turned on the lights, he was perplexed to discover, carefully woven into Charlotte’s web, the following words:
“Look, I chose a dark, out-of-the-way corner for my web. I’m eating flies for you. Can’t you just leave me alone? Oh, and by the way, I agree with the Vietnamese woman. Your music sucks. Don’t you have any David Bowie?“
Scott Wright © 2022