It’s important to remember that evolution worked in minimum-sized steps. New structures and organs don’t appear from nothing, but are modified from existing parts of an organism, and every incremental step has to grant a reproductive advantage over the previous step. Radio transceivers would seem to be problematic, since if there is no preexisting source of radio energy in the environment there’s no advantage to starting the process of developing a radio receiver, and there’s no advantage in having a radio transmitter unless you also have a radio receiver. It might be possible to develop a short-range electric field transceiver system by starting with sense organs intended to pick up the passive electric fields generated by every living organism, such as many aquatic animals already have, and then coupling it to an electric organ capable of generating controlled electric field, which is also already present in nature. The problem comes with making the jump from detecting and generating static short-range electric fields, to generating modulated RF energy capable of traveling long distances.
There are two basic issues here, which I think are becoming somewhat confounded.
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Using radio waves originating from the Sun (or other natural phenomena) to passively detect things in the environment, in the same way organisms use vision. Because most physical objects are much more transparent to radio waves than they are to light waves, radio is much less useful and radio receptors are less likely to evolve.
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Communication between animals through self-generated radio waves, like many animals use sound waves (and a few bioluminescent animals use light). While this could be useful, it is unlikely to develop in the absence of pre-existing receptors.
Wait, I’ve got it, a plausible path for evolution of radio communication. First, you get an organism that sequesters metal from its environment for structural purposes: It makes itself a metal carapace or spine or something of the sort. This could happen gradually, starting from an “alloy” of metal and something like bone or shell, that over time develops to have more and more metal in it. Then, once the metal is established, the important nerves start to migrate to close to where the metal is (if they weren’t already there), that being the most well-protected part of the animal. When the animal is panicked or scared or fighting or whatever, there’s a lot of electrical activity in the nervous system (possibly as an active defense like an electric eel’s shock, or if nothing else the impulses to control the muscles for flight-or-fight). For some animals, these impulses end up producing weak currents in the metal carapace that produce radio waves, and the radio waves are picked up by the carapaces of other animals and transmitted to their nervous systems. The other animals quickly learn to interpret this feeling as meaning that another of their kind is in trouble, and to take the appropriate action (either joining up to defend it, or running away, or hiding, or whatever makes sense for whatever this critter is). Once you’ve got the mechanism in place for this radio-wave cry of pain, evolution goes to work to make it clearer and easier to send and receive. And eventually, like with sonic vocalizations, the radio system might evolve to allow more complex communication.
And one of my office-mates just suggested another possibility: Apparently ammonia has a radio-frequency molecular resonance, corresponding to the pyramid shape inverting. There might be some way to harness that.
That is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a very long time!! :D:D
maybe those who wear foil hats are mutants/evolved to transceive.
Well, it would come in quite handy for silent hunting & intertribal warfare.
It might be mentioned that some animals already sequester metals for sensory reasons: birds and other animals have a magnetic sense that is related to small granules of magnetite incorporated into some tissues. So you already have a close relationship between metal and some sensory nerves.
Doesn’t the long wavelength of radio signals pose a problem? What would be the likelihood of an organism evolving any kind of useful antenna between the lengths of 1m and 1km ?
The transmitter is probably the big hurdle.
Here’s a story about human radio which I experienced personally:
http://amasci.com/tesla/earplas.html
For transmitting, you’d want to be an electric eel with a way to short out your battery organ (produce sparks.)
Also, electric fishes already communicate via VLF EM. It’s voltage signalling, but more connected to ion flows in water than to simple e-fields.
Hmm. Since I was a kid, I’ve noticed that if I walk into some place like Radio Shack, I hear a very high-pitched sound that seems to come from within my head. I always figured it was just really fine hearing.
I think there is quite a bit more nuance to it than that. Each new step needs to not be so deleterious as to prevent the organism from reproducing. This allows for mutations that are advantageous, neutral or even deleterious. In the long run deleterious mutations will kill, but this isn’t the case for neutral mutations which can pile on over time, and even be converted into something useful in the long run.
If we stretch the definition of “radio” to include microwaves, then the wavelengths can be short enough to utilize smaller antennas.
Organisms could also evolve fractal antennas.
Heck, even without stretching to microwaves, you can have a pocket-sized device that can transmit and receive longer wavelengths. It maybe won’t work as well as something with a longer antenna, but it’ll work. And there are plenty of organisms larger than a pocket radio.