Interesting if brief article here on studies into echolocation in bats. Specifically the way certain sounds may be optimized for open or wooded environments.
Bats are the only mammals with true flight, of course. The fossil record is spotty and we don't know all the steps that led to them being such. The question of why they can fly and no other animals can is as much philosophical as scientific. The way that they use echolocation seems to suggest that the mammalian approach to flight is quite different from the avian one.
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While it's true bats are the only mammals that fly, it's also true there are a large number of different species of bats - including two very different types according to wikipedia. Microbats use echolocation when flying and eat insects whereas megabats have well developed eyesight and eat fruit and nectar. Biologists seem to believe all bats evolved in forests where they learned to survive by dropping down from trees to hunt and eventually gained true fight. Wouldn't it have been interesting had our race developed similarly? Just think of the architecture.
I've been reading Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion these past few days. He thinks scientists have boxed themselves in over the course of the last century, an opinion I tend to agree with. Anyway, one interesting thing he mentions concerns homing pigeons; it's understood these birds have some sort of magnetic sense that allows them to find their way home from thousands of miles away. His feeling is that the internal magnet alone can't account for that exactitude and to prove his point he suggests that if a person carrying a compass was dropped into a forest hundreds of miles from home they'd know which way was north but wouldn't necessarlly be able to find their house.
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btw: I forgot to tell you I read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops for the first time since high school. It was good then and it seemed even more relevant now.
Good point on the difference between microbats and megabats. The divergent strategies are kind of apparent when you look at them. Microbats have truly gigantic ears in relation to their face and little beady eyes, which isn't to say they can't be cute. Megabats have more proportional eyes and ears, and their snouts are somewhat reminiscent of bears or foxes. If our species had developed flight it wouldn't exactly be our species. It would certainly be something to see, though.
I think it's very likely--or maybe a better word would be "undeniable"--that scientists have hemmed themselves in over the past century. The institutions that have taken over the practice of science, and the money that is required to keep them running, mean that some areas are just verboten because looking into them would lead to unwanted questions. Don't know if I've shared this with you before but Matthew Crawford wrote a great article about it. "A healthy dose of careerism and political talent was required. Such qualities are orthogonal, let us say, to the underlying truth-motive of science." And there is so much more to explore. Not sure if it was Sheldrake but I have read someone writing about magnetic sense before, and it's fascinating.
"The Machine Stops" appears to be one of those dystopias that people in upper echelons *cough* Zuckerberg *cough* are determined to inflict on the rest of us.
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