If the suggestion is that at some point in the distant past a species developed some form of psychic ability and then went instinct I think we would struggle to detect them in the fossil record.
My guess is that psychic abilities would be very expensive to maintain. The human brain has a pretty large overhead in terms of day to day energy costs for running, the energy and material needed to grow it and the impact on things like maternal mortality in child birth. So I'd expect pscyhic abilities to be expensive and therefore require a quick and or incremental pay back. I think pretty high intelligence, for an animal, would be required to make best use of psychic powers. So I think it unlikely to have evolved.
If the suggestion is that they walk amongst us then there are two possibilities I can think of. They are "elves" or "vampires" or "cats". Either they are creatures with human level intelligence and pyschic abilities who keep themselves hidden from us possibly preying on us or farming us or they are moderately intelligent for an animal and live amonghst us nudging us to provide for them.
A third option is that we as a species are on the border of evolving pyschic abilities and on occassion a human is born with them and becomes surprisingly successful or classed as a supernatural being.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2017-01-12 10:39 am (UTC)If the suggestion is that at some point in the distant past a species developed some form of psychic ability and then went instinct I think we would struggle to detect them in the fossil record.
My guess is that psychic abilities would be very expensive to maintain. The human brain has a pretty large overhead in terms of day to day energy costs for running, the energy and material needed to grow it and the impact on things like maternal mortality in child birth. So I'd expect pscyhic abilities to be expensive and therefore require a quick and or incremental pay back. I think pretty high intelligence, for an animal, would be required to make best use of psychic powers. So I think it unlikely to have evolved.
If the suggestion is that they walk amongst us then there are two possibilities I can think of. They are "elves" or "vampires" or "cats". Either they are creatures with human level intelligence and pyschic abilities who keep themselves hidden from us possibly preying on us or farming us or they are moderately intelligent for an animal and live amonghst us nudging us to provide for them.
A third option is that we as a species are on the border of evolving pyschic abilities and on occassion a human is born with them and becomes surprisingly successful or classed as a supernatural being.