What is in a name?

Resistance to scientific ideas is not always due to lack of communication resulting from language Carriers. Resistance can also arise out of preferred bias. And because of calling things by the wrong name. The story of circadian rhythms in bees is instructive here. Beling (1929), a student of Karl von Frisch, had strong evidence in 1929 that his bees were orienting in time with the help of endogenous clocks. Time training experiments in which food was daily offered at a given hour, had to be 24 h apart and the insects would not (en)train to 19 h cycles. Three years later, Otto Wahl demonstrated that the rhythm, which the members of the von Frisch school called variously Zeitsinn (time sense) or Zeit-gedachtnis (time memory), was inborn not learnt, and that honey bees that had never experienced light: dark cycles could still be entrained to 24 h cycles of restricted feeding in total darkness. There was a great reluctance to call the phenomenon by its right name of circadian rhythm. This cannot be seen in retrospect as an eccen­tricity or as a harmless fad. Having called it Zeitsinn the bee researchers began concentrating on environmental parameters such as the sun’s azimuth, polarization of light, landmarks, humidity, wind direction and wind speed as possible causes, to the detriment of progress in rhythm research. Renner (1955) later performed the by now famous translocation experiments on honey bees, training them to search for food in Paris and flying them to New York, to see if they relied on endogenous time keeping or responded to local (New York) time cues. Pittendrigh (1993) commented: “While in Munich in 1959, I asked Martin Lindauer why they (the von Frisch laboratory) had still not reset the bee’s clock with a Hoffmann-like shift of the light: dark cycle” (referring to K Hoffmann’s demonstration that a time-shift in the light: dark cycle caused a proportional shift in the orien­tational clock in starlings). “Because”, he replied “bees don’t have clocks, they have Zeitgedachtnis”. That is what is in a name. That is also why so few people outside Germany knew about the monumental contribu­tions of these early workers to chronobiology.

There are calendars sold now in supermarkets which inform the owner of his good and bad days, the days on which some things may be done, and days on which certain things may not be done. This pseudoscience called ‘biorhythms’ threatened for a while the newly won respectability of chronobiology of the biological rhythms kind. Believers in the cult of biorhythms proclaim the existence of the 23-day male cycle, 28-day female cycle, 33-day intellectual cycle, a 38-day compassion cycle, a 43-day aesthetic cycle, a 48-day self-awareness cycle and 53-day spiritual cycle. An author of a book on this subject (Gittelson 1983) states that Dr Wilhelm Fliess of Berlin started it all in 1880. This Fliess was an otolaryngologist, a member of the Berlin Board of Health, President of the German Academy of Sciences and a friend and mentor of Sigmund Freud. There is no evidence that Fliess impressed even his contemporaries with his notions regarding biorhythms. By the time of his death in 1928 he was yet to see biorhythms accepted as any kind of science in his native land, let alone elsewhere. As for a modern opinion on biorhythms here is the trenchant comment of Pittendrigh: “I consider this stuff an utter, total and unadulterated fraud' I consider anyone who offers to explain my life in terms of 23-day rhythms a numerological nut, just like somebody who wants to explore the rhythms of pig-iron prices to 14 decimal places”. A National Institute of Mental Health (USA) paper classifies biorhythms as mythology. With all its absurdities, the concept of biorhythms has an obvious attraction for the sort of people who are drawn to parapsychology, astrology, horoscopes and to a belief in UFOs (Gittelson 1983).