The question was put to me—in a gruff voice that made me feel I should be paying better attention—by Rickye Heffner, a professor of psychology at the University of Toledo. “I turn my head and try to see where the snap is coming from?” I ventured. “You look for it! You want to know what made the sound and where it is. You want to orient your eyes toward it. Among mammals, the ears are animal detectors and they tell your eyes where to go to hunt for the animals they detect. So the ears have to have sufficient range and be able to hear the right frequencies to locate a sound source. That seems to be what’s driving the evolution of hearing.” Heffner and her husband, Henry Heffner, have dedicated the last forty-plus years of their lives to producing a vast profusion of studies with titles like “Hearing in Glires: Domestic Rabbit, Cotton Rat, Feral House Mouse, and Kangaroo Rat.” They seem to have explored the auditory mechanisms and evolution of hearing in every warm-blooded, young-suckling creature in existence.
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