the Waggle Dance of the Honeybee vs. the Mavens of Mass Perfumery
Much as aromatic flights are at the ready, an uninitiated guest still finds time to strike up an unthoughtful conversation, “It’s only a matter of time until a kiosk is developed for jogging ancient memory traces with specific pheromonal compounds that will be piped in. Given that the application software to fulfill the idea has already been created.”
It’s like a quintessential wet dream for the rodeo cowboys of chemistry, to reduce the manifold multifarious elicitations of Creation to a single or intelligible set of molecular solicitations of straightforward causation.
In any event, Saffron opens up with a preambulary discussion, “The black-tailed deer dispenses chemical bids and calls and cues on the ground, against tree branches, and into air, producing and secreting pheromones from the tarsal gland, metatarsal gland, forehead gland, preorbital gland, interdigital glands, feces, and urine. That’s seven different pathways of transmission, and the number of indications are even still being tabulated.”
The Natural World is awash with enigmatic cocktails of volatile organic compounds whose chemical profiles and structures convey information that is more densely packed and elusive than those proud technophiles who don white lab coats will readily admit.
“The honeybee has more than twelve different exocrine glands devoted to the project of social organization, and still counting.”
Discrete chemical signals are often made multifold by their embellishment with enrichment devices. For instance, rates of release and durations of fade are varied.
“The well-known waggle dance of the honeybee is performed in degrees of intensity. The extent of its liveliness and duration depends on the quality of food found and the favorability of weather.”
And the dynamic messages are frequently combined, conveying at once or sequentially, to make new composite communications of distinct meaning. Biologists apply the term syntax to denote the order of signal succession.
“Nectars of tobacco blossoms comprise constituents in fluxing ratios, for example, levels of nicotine (to repel) and benzyl acetone (to attract?) are adjusted, hence flying visitors to the plants encounter modulated missives — welcome or move along or don’t do that or come hither or don’t leave yet or…”
Most communication within ecosystems is nuanced and issued in degrees and extents. In this matter, we should bear in mind that gradation conveys more detail, as graded messages take up places along gradients that span gaps between discrete signals.
“The additional information is a function of the logarithm of the total number of distinguishable points along the gradient.”
In the promiscuous hands of humankind, the prevailing Earth-assailing kind of humankind, the elaboration of Creation is diminished we find, as any mystery is assigned to be precisely defined, and graded intricacy is likewise consigned. This dumbing-down operation, whereby the perplexity of complexity yields to determinable flattened standards, is carried out mainly for the benefit of Nature’s counterfeiters.
“Ants release alarm substances in approximate relation to the degree to which they’ve been stimulated.”
It is over the objections of many and the denial of others that the potential diversity of floral fragrances is so immense as to remain today inscrutable. Nonetheless, in the meantime, empiricism again and again yields to poetry.
“The fruit aroma of apricots is constructed of components often in glycosidic form that are measuredly and synchronously released by cause of enzymatic hydrolysis during ripening.”
It’s not sentimental embellishment when researchers allude to conspiratorial intrigues of flowers conveyed through the language of perfume, references that can be found even in the unimpassioned columns of dry peer-reviewed biology journals.
“Cycads (Macrozamia) dramatically pump out extra numbers of aromatic metabolites with a thermogenic burst to expel pollinating thrips with hot toxic perfume. Contrastingly, those same pollen-bearing thrips are attracted to the vapors when the same principles are waftingly present in concentrations a thousandfold less.”
The mavens of mass perfumery, with their exaggerated sense of understanding and inflated sense of control, follow any shortcuts available to redesign perfumes of Life by means of their reducing imaginations.
“Botanists have experimentally lured, with nine volatile compounds, the hawkmoth pollinators of night-blooming Datura plants. Yet in the wild, the identical angel’s trumpet flowers promulgate notices with evaporative launches of over seventy different molecules, can that be right?”
