[yaakov34]

I am not the best person to ask, since it's not my field. I heard this from the neuroscientists that I worked with. My understanding is that there are spiking and non-spiking neurons in most nervous systems, including human, but most of the ones in ours are spiking. The earliest-evolved animals, such as nematodes, do not have spiking neurons, or myelin, or some of the ion channels in neuron membranes that more evolved neurons have. Their neurons still have axons and dendrites, but the signals propagate much more slowly and in different ways. I am not sure how well they are understood.

As I said, this is possibly out-of-date information. If there is someone here from the neuroscience field, they can probably make a better comment.

[wanderingstan]

Wikipedia agrees there are spiking and non-spiking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_neuron_model

Not all the cells of the nervous system produce the type of spike that define the scope of the spiking neuron models. For example, cochlear hair cells, retinal receptor cells, and retinal bipolar cells do not spike.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-spiking_neuron

[heyoni]

burning_hamster says that’s been refuted and the belief stems from the difficulty in studying nematodes properly.