in our own world, creatures use gestures, color, shapes, lights, and chemicals, and even electrical fields for both sensory and communications purposes, active and passive.

But no one who talks about telepathy seems to have the slightest clue as to how or even IF it works. And it has a major drawback too. Direct communication of thought, without modulating some physical medium, would never have allowed us to develop abstract symbolic language, which is even more important than the sheer transmission of emotional states.

Human language is important because it is independent of medium: it can be spoken, written, transmitted as code on modulated EM radiation,
signed with our hands, or even tapped out on a telegraph key, semaphore flags, blinking light or computer keyboard. It can be stored, amplified, copied, and translated from one symbol system to another. A race that relied on telepathy would never have to progress past the grunt, wink and snarl stage. Consider, would we have access to the knowledge and culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and been able to build on it, if they had had telepathy and never bothered to write anything down?

It's not that I don't believe in telepathy as much as I think we're better off without it. Even if it were possible, I believe evolution would quickly prune it out. The very fact we went to the trouble of evolving such highly complex and subtle speech and languages tells me that if telepathy ever did exist, it was a dead end.