My
puzzlement with Mud Dauber wasp I’ve docu- mented earlier (pg0FC
and pg0FD); here
I would like to make some other point: the difference between data
and information.
Mud
Dauber wasps are building their clay nests in the interior of our
concrete block barbecue - which I’m using once weekly or so. They
are building new nests next to burned ones from last week. Surely
they can sense the smoked walls, surely they can see the last week
nests smoked if not scorched. But those are data. It looks that
evolution did not capacitate them to process those data into an
information about appositeness of the place.
Our
senses by which the external world is perceived, all of them,
collect data only. It is the brain where an information is born. Or
not. Take, for instance, the recent popular science article by
Croatian academician Vladimir Paar in which he claims that an ice
age is imminent in the near future because Earth is running away
from Sun. Now, the data out there point to a stable Earth’s orbit
for at least several billion years. But those are data. An
information is born in the brain.