Do humans have supernatural powers?

That question has come up a lot in the past few months, because I live in a Harry Potter household. Supernatural powers are the subject of long dinner-table discussions, along with demands that I rate in order of excellence the first three Harry Potter books (I have yet to read the fourth). My evaluation of the books as a whole, for anyone who has not encountered them, is simple: pretty good, and a lot better than pretty good if you are thirteen years old.

But what about the supernatural powers with which the books are filled? Rather than waffling my way around this question, which is what I do at home, let me work into it gradually.

Some animals have capabilities that we are able to explain only by analogy and extension of what we ourselves can do. For example, a trained tracking dog can follow the path taken by a human or some other animal hours or days before. We say to ourselves, that's no big mystery, the dog follows the scent. We smell things, too. The dog's enormous sensitivity to smells is no more than what we do, greatly amplified. It's the same with moths, some of which are the smell champions of the animal kingdom. A male silk moth can recognize and respond to a single molecule of a chemical known as bombykol, emitted by a ready-to- mate female silk moth. But it's still nothing more than an upgraded version of our own sense of smell. Nothing supernatural there.

The same is true of hearing. A bat flying at night, or a dolphin swimming through muddy water, emits a series of short, high-pitched sounds. The reflection of these sounds from obstacles ahead of the flying moth or swimming dolphin provides a sonic view of the world. This "echo-location" is so precise that a bat can fly in total darkness through a pattern of randomly placed threads, and a dolphin can negotiate its way safely through criss-crossing cables. It's surely the case that both animals in some sense "see" an image built up from the echoes. We, however, also have some small talent for locating the direction of a sound and gauging its approximate distance. We don't (most of us) go around emitting a series of high-pitched squeaks, but we can hear echoes. Again, we argue that nothing more is involved than the interpretation of information received by our senses. It is done much better than we can do it, but it is natural, not "super"- natural.

For something rather more mysterious, let's turn to the social insects, the ants and bees and termites. Each individual insect is blessed with only a few thousand brain cells, yet with great competence they build and maintain their nests and hives. Watch a pair of ants, standing and perhaps touching antennas, then running off to fulfill their duties. They do not have language, as we know language. How are they communicating needs and instructions to each other?

It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that it's telepathy, but that is not the usual explanation. The hive or nest is known to be awash in chemical messengers known as pheromones. These are a form of hormone, given off by the individual members, and it is the density, flow, and nature of the pheromones which dictate what all hive members will do. Supernatural? Not quite. Humans also give off and receive hormones, though we usually override their messages with our conscious minds.

We are still saying, just like us but more so. What about animal capabilities for which we can find no human equivalent. Are there any?

I believe that there are. None of our senses responds directly to electric or magnetic fields, nor do our bodies generate any such fields, other than those wisps of current and magnetic forces detected within the brain itself by recent and sensitive brain-monitoring devices. Other animals, however, use electricity directly and routinely. The electric eel and electric ray stun their prey with a weapon for which human physiology offers no parallel, and whose explanation would have baffled everyone on Earth less than three centuries ago. We also have no sense organs to detect magnetism. Migrating birds and homing pigeons, however, almost certainly make use of the Earth's magnetic field. Both they and bees detect and use the polarization of sunlight, a sense for which we have no equivalent. These powers cannot be regarded as a mere extension, however great, of what we do ourselves to a lesser extent. Thus I give credit to animals for some abilities that are, in human terms, quite supernatural.

However, that was not my original question. I asked it the other way round: Do we, humans, possess any "supernatural" powers?

I believe that from the point of view of the rest of life on Earth, we certainly do. Furthermore, our powers are more impressive than anything else in Nature. Only humans can sit in a group for hours or days or even months, doing no more than uttering a strange variety of sounds and marking odd squiggles on sheets or boards; and then, armed with those sheets and boards and, if necessary, without another sound, go off to build a device that travels on water or on land or in the air, moves faster than any animal, and delivers death from miles away.

Humans have powers that exceed the supernatural powers of all other creatures combined: we can speak, and we can think. It's a pity we don't do the latter more often.

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