The Sphex story: How humans kept repeating themselves

Talk by Fred Keijzer, PhD; Department of Theoretical Philosophy; Groningen University, the Netherlands

Jean Henri Fabre was a 19th Century French entomologist who became widely known for a series of popular books on insect behavior: his Souvenirs Entomologique. In the first volume, published in 1879, he reported that a female digger wasp of the species Sphex flavipennis could be made to repeat herself as much as forty times in a routine for provisioning her burrow with crickets. Fabre’s account caught on and became a classic case that inspired further research (for example by Tinbergen and Baerends) and eventually became a story known by an increasingly wide audience.

Attention widened and increased further when the story travelled to the then newly developing cognitive sciences in the 1960s. There it was used as an example how insect behavior could be seen as a basic computational routine and Daniel Dennett even introduced the notion of sphexishness for getting stuck into such routines.

Within the cognitive sciences, the Sphex story became a classic and regularly used example to illustrate the presence of some limited intelligence in various organisms, including insects, until recently. Nowadays, the story is retold in a more critical way – as it is here – and used to showcase how the behavior of insects and other invertebrates has been underestimated on the basis of equivocal evidence. This talk will provide an overview of this history and its various stages, including the last one where it has become increasingly accepted that insects and other invertebrates are definitely capable of intelligence and (some argue) potentially even consciousness.