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What's the closest any animal species has come to evolving to have telepathy? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago by shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee to c/biology@mander.xyz

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[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Many animals have a vastly superior sense of smell, can see light outside our visible spectrum or hear sound outside our hearing range. But it would be silly to call all these things “telepathy” just because we humans don’t have these senses.

It would be silly to call these things telepathy because by themselves they don't facilitate a way to communicate thoughts between two minds. Even in the case of radio waves, a sense of radio waves wouldn't be telepathy by itself, unless there is also a mechanism of generating these radio waves, and unless these two mechanisms are used to communicate ideas between users, just like the sense of hearing is just one part of spoken communication.

If a species had an organ that could generate light outside the visible spectrum to accompany their superior eyes, and they were using it to talk, then yes "telepathic" would a sensible word to describe that. But that special organ, and the mental processing, would be the important parts, not the better eyes.

And when you’re talking about the biology of animals it seems quite self-centred to compare everything to us. We are just one very specific animal.

Well, I didn't write the definitions. :)

[–] tobogganablaze@lemmus.org 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It would be silly to call these things telepathy because by themselves they don’t facilitate a way to communicate thoughts between two minds

A lot of animals use pheromones to communicate details about themselves in a far more complex way than we could by smelling.

and unless these two mechanisms are used to communicate ideas between users.

I think some of the peacock spiders, despite being already visually stunning, actually have UV light reflective surfaces (as well as the abililty to see UV) and use those in their mating display. So even while not being able to generate UV light they still use it to communicate in a way that we couldn't percieve. It might be a bit of a stretch, but in general you could communicate by manipulating/reflecting natural radio background waves, just as many animals do it with visible (or invisible) light.