Add a Comment
Email This
Statistics
Thread parent sort order:
Thread verbosity:
0 Nerd-Its
RE: Albert Einstein quote on bees
I would like to know the true origin of this quote. If Einstein really said something like that, should be easily confirmed. It is crazy how one person can make up something and before you know it, it's all over the web. Information source is key.
RSS
RE: Albert Einstein quote on bees
Searching around a bit, the variant I found that seems most like Big Al, and seems (to me) to be most credibly attributed to him is "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left of life. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
The farthest back I've traced it is to a 2005 article in Der Kritischer Agrarbericht by Walter Haefeker, who ends the article with his quote:
That matches the English version of the quote I gave. Haefeker doesn't give a source for the quote, though. Like everyone I've seen, he uses it as a throwaway to lend emotional support for his position (he very vocally opposed genetically modified crops). The footnote that looks like it might offer a source for the quote just says, "for more in the theme of this paper see the position paper of the German Beekeeper's Federation, in 'Genetic Agriculture and Professional Beekeeping', from December 2003", with a pointer of where to download it.
But, let's assume for a moment that he really did say something like this. Does it really affect the argument materially?
Einstein was a theoretical physicist. I've seen no evidence that he was a beekeeper or in any way an expert on the ecology of bees. I have to doubt he was more than a casual fan of the subject.
Granted he was a very smart man. And it's hard for a layman to argue with him - it seems obvious that a loss of the bee population would severely affect plant reproductive cycles, and that that would seriously hurt our ability to feed both ourselves and our livestock, and that can't be good.
But it takes much more of an expert than I am - and probably much more of an expert than Big Al was, at least on agriculture - to judge just how big that effect would be and whether mankind would survive it.
Now, I'm not at all arguing that Einstein was wrong, or that the bee problem isn't significant. I simply don't know the answers, and I think this kind of baseless "appeal to authority" is a cheap shot. Who cares what Einstein said about bees? Even Antonio Banderas has more claim to being an expert in that area - at least he plays one on TV.
View Full Discussion