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by throwaway44773 741 days ago
Animals who see infrared are cold blooded. My guess is that the hardware that evolution can easily produce to detect and process infrared gets flooded by the heat of warmblooded animal and is therefore not effective for them.
2 comments

Most animals don't see into thermal IR ranges eitehr but the ones closer to the visible spectrum.
We could in theory avoid the problem if our eyes were at the top of antennas.

But yeah, genetic evolution does not explore states widely different from its origin. The more complex an organism, the more "conservative" the entire process is, and we are quite complex.