Without our senses, we wouldn’t be able to thrive and understand the world around us. Yet, at the same time, we are severely limited by our senses. This is especially true when we compare ourselves to other animals. Although human beings have a unique trait of higher-reasoning and self-awareness, our reality may actually be a limited, illusory perception.

When individual senses are directly compared to humans and other animals, we look primitive in comparison. In fact, there is an entirely different reality being experienced by amphibians, fish, mammals, birds, insects and reptiles. These enhanced senses undoubtedly shape an entirely unique perception of existence for the life of these animals.

Unique Animal Senses

Sight

• Some insects like ants can see polarized light, while some fish can see infrared light.
• Cats have a mirror-like membrane in the backs of their eyes that lets them hunt and move in almost complete darkness.
• The eyes of insects and birds are attuned to wavelengths of light outside the visible range that humans see in

Smell

• A Silkworm Moth can detect pheromones up to 11km away
• Snakes smell with their tongue, which collects scent particles in the air, and then makes contact with the Jacobson’s organ, located on the roof of the mouth.

Taste

• A pig’s tongue contains 15,000 taste buds compared to the 9,000 taste buds that a human has.

Touch

• Rats use the long hairs in the same way that blind people use canes. By whisking the hairs across objects they come across, rats and other rodents form mental pictures of their surroundings.
• Butterflies have hairs on their wings to detect changes in air pressure.

Hearing

• Dogs can hear sound as high as 40,000 Hz.

Additional Senses

• Migrating birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to stay their course during long flights. One recent study suggests birds might have a form of synesthesia that lets them “see” the planet’s magnetic lines as patterns of color or light that is overlaid on their visual surroundings.
• Bats and dolphins use echolocation for movement and locating objects.
• Sharks have specialized electrosensing receptors with thresholds as low as 0.005 uV/cm. These receptors may be used to locate prey. The dogfish can detect a flounder that is buried under the sand and emitting 4 uAmp of current.

A Different Reality

The limitations of our senses raise unlimited questions about what we perceive as our reality. For example, the following questions immediately come to mind:

1. What would our relationships be like if we had a heightened sense of pheromones?
2. What would our environment tell us and how would we interact with it, if we could see polarized and infrared light?
3. How would we interact with our environment if we could hear sounds from far away and at different spectrums?
4. What would it be like if we could use echolocation to determine where we go and how we identify objects?
5. If we could taste like a pig, would we be overly consumed with taste and eating (more so than we are now)?

Our limited perceptions, coupled with our survival instincts, contribute to our inability to fully comprehend our true reality and also fuels our instinctual superstitious behavior. When spiritualists claim that there is much more beyond what we can perceive, they are absolutely correct. Except in our case, it has more to do with our limitation to perceive our environment and our higher-reasoning’s desire to survive and live forever.

So why don’t we have these enhanced senses? The answer is simple. The process of evolution decided we didn’t need them to survive and thrive.

References

• Neuroscience for Kids – Animal Senses
• Amazing Animal Abilities | LiveScience

Our Reality is Defined by Our Senses is a post from: Freethinker

1. Start by making sure your friend can explain to you the scientific method and what “theory” means. Science builds its theories in order to comply to observable facts. It is theoretical and open to revision as fact dictates. A good scientist would reject or revise the evolutionary theory based on the facts that are progressively presented. In fact, evolutionary theory has been revised many times over and will continue to be revised in the future as the facts demand. This might be all you need to do to reach agreement.
2. Find out what your friend believes about the bible. Do they think that it is inerrant, i.e., free from errors? Do they think that bible stories could be interpreted as metaphors or should they be taken as the literal truth? You will learn a lot right here.
3. Point out that your friend thinks that this creation story is the right one, even when there have been so many creation stories (that contradict each other) over the course of human history. [You could ask why they think this one is better than the others, but you won’t win any more friends that way!)
4. Discuss with your advocate whether or not children look like their parents. Do they inherit traits genetically? And can we notice any trends over time — for example, people’s feet are bigger today than they were 200 years ago. If they admit that traits are passed on genetically, move on to step 2.
5. Discuss how variation occurs from one generation to the next due to random chromosomal mutations. Animals (and people) can have slightly different colored skin, hair/fur and dimensions from their ancestors. Show that these differences can be advantageous (eg: a giraffe with a longer neck can eat more leaves, be healthier, live longer, and reproduce more)
6. Discuss whether animals who are badly adapted to their environments will die. e.g. could a white crocodile sneak up on its prey as well as a dark green one could? Of course it couldn’t! So the green croc would have a better chance of survival, and a better chance and procreation, while the poor white crocodile is starving to death, the green croc is having lots of (green) babies.
7. If your creationist defender has agreed with you so far, they have all but lost their argument. Ask them to imagine a fish having two babies: one with weak fishy fins and watery lungs, and one with strong fins and lungs able to breathe air out of water. Which one would survive? well, quite possibly both. The water-dwelling one can find food in the sea, while the air-breathing one is free to proliferate on the land. Natural Selection has begun!
8. Note, an informed creationist might ask where the previously non-existing genetic information for air-breathing lungs suddenly came from.
9. Tell your advocates that evidence of transitional phases is all around us — it’s just that, alas, we do not live long enough to witness prolonged evolution over hundreds of thousands of years.
10. Inform your creationist friend about the infinitesimal chance of an animal becoming a fossil. One has to fall in the right place, be covered in the right material, be buried under tons of rock, left for eons, then brought to the surface through tectonic activity, and then dug up and discovered! This means that the fossils we do have can only provide us with a partial picture of things. But even though there are gaps in our knowledge, we can still get a fairly good idea of how things went — just like if you read a novel with every other page ripped out, you’d still get a very good grasp of the story.
11. Point out that relying on God for an explanation of life on earth seems like a rather lazy way of looking at things. Life on earth is complex and intricate, and to say that God just snapped his fingers and brought it into existence seems like a cop-out.

From theCrazy Christian Blog

How To Defend Evolution is a post from: Freethinker