Senses
The species on Darwin have all evolved sonar, echo-location using a variety of sounds as their primary sense, rather than perceiving light, as most animals on Earth do. Many have complicated cephalons to aid in this sense. The majority have also evolved biolights; but rather than communicating information in the visible light spectrum, biolights on Darwin IV function in the infrared range, as all Darwinian animals are quite sensitive to that spectrum. It is important to note that their sensory organs to detect light in the infrared spectrum are more comparable to thermoreceptors found in pit vipers or rattlesnakes. The Rimerunner still has one bizarre, retractable, atrophying eye, a remnant from a time when sight-based organisms still had a place on Darwin IV. Also, most species are hermaphrodites.
Read more about this topic: Darwin IV
Famous quotes containing the word senses:
“The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained—a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)
“The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)