We found an amusing phrase — “sheer apian ebullience” — on a marked page in an old notebook recently, so we plugged it into Google, and got a single page back, which was of course the article from which we copied the phrase. We still like it a lot:
It was well known that a bee that had located a source of food habitually returned home and performed an elaborate “waggle dance” that contained information about the direction and distance of the food from the hive. The vast majority of scientists assumed that conveying this information was the purpose of the dance: that the dance was, in effect, a form of bee language. Chomsky, however, disliked the notion that such a minimally evolved creature as a bee could have language, because language was, to him, distinctly human; he also disliked the implication that language in humans was, like the waggle dance, a skill that had evolved because it was useful. Chomsky had, accordingly, seized on the work of a maverick scientist, A. M. Wenner, who claimed that although humans could detect information from the dance, the bees themselves did not: they found their way to food using only odor.
“You can’t just assume that because something’s there it is functional, or has been adapted for,” Chomsky pointed out. “It could just be there. Crickets don’t chirp so you can enjoy the summer evening.” Crickets were a useful example for Chomsky, because scientists had managed to extract a lot of information from crickets’ noises, but there was no evidence to suggest that crickets themselves could interpret the noises, or showed any interest in doing so. Despite the cricket example, however, nobody seemed convinced. It seemed very unlikely that bees might perform an elaborate dance for no reason other than sheer apian ebullience.
(The New Yorker, “The Devil’s Accountant,” 3/31/2003, by Larissa MacFarquhar)
It’d be a good name for a band.