[HN Gopher] Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate An...
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Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals
Author : rbanffy
Score : 180 points
Date : 2025-04-08 08:36 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| As if Godwin's Law, it amuses me how not a single animal
| intelligence discussion on HN goes without a Children of Time
| reference, which has a race of uplifted animals the article
| mentioned - in this case crows. Amazing series.
| jotux wrote:
| >As if Godwin's Law, it amuses me how not a single animal
| intelligence discussion on HN goes without a Children of Time
| reference, which has a race of uplifted animals the article
| mentioned - in this case crows
|
| At the time of writing this comment, there is not a single
| reference to Children of Time in this thread other than the one
| you have added.
| Loughla wrote:
| 6 hours later and this is still the only reference to that.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I guess there's no reason for survival of the fittest to equal
| more intelligence.
|
| Easy to forget that "fittest" is only relevant to the
| environment/context you are living in - if intelligence does not
| make you "fitter" for that then it will probably disappear.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Footnote: "survival of the fittest" is circular.
|
| Bob: It's about the survival of the fittest.
|
| Alice: Fittest _with respect to what_?
|
| Bob: Survival.
|
| So, survival of the fittest to survive, or what survives,
| survives.
|
| It is utterly banal, but in popular culture, it has been
| "elevated" into a deepity.
| harperlee wrote:
| I think it is 'fittest with respect with the current /
| incoming environment', in contrast with 'strongest' /
| 'fastest' / some other absolute measurement, at the expense
| of the rest.
| bmacho wrote:
| It's not circular, it's just _true_ in the purest sense. As
| all mathematical _theorems_ are either tautologies or
| consequences of assumptions, therefore pure assumptions.
|
| For me _survival of the fittest_ just means that _with high
| probability those genes will survive who have a high
| probability to survive_ in an evolutionary setting. Is this
| _trivial_? In this wording it is trivial. But it can be
| useful. (And also it is not that trivial in a different
| wording. Just like other theorems, e.g. the theorem about the
| perpendicular bisectors of a triangle 's sides. If a point O
| is equal distance from A and B and B and C then it is equal
| distance from A and C. Tautology, circular, assumption, name
| it what you want, it's math.)
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Survival of the fittest to reproduce. Not just to survive,
| but to spread. The key profundity is that it's so banal,
| there's no need for a God directing it.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Fittest means best fitted to the prevailing environment, but
| of course the fitness being tested is ability to survive and
| reproduce (i.e. keep on playing the game of evolution).
|
| It's almost a circular/tautological description ("survival of
| the survivors"), but "fittest" does at least allude to why
| some survive better than others (better adapted to prevailing
| environment), as well as the fact ("fitt-EST" vs "fit") that
| it's a competition for limited resources. Fitness is a matter
| of degree.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Read the fine article, please. It is not about intelligence
| disappearing and re-evolving.
| lkrubner wrote:
| If intelligence was always the correct answer then it would
| have developed much faster than it did.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Inteligence is the endgame answer, brute forcing it gets you
| 85% of the way, but only inteligence will get you to 99.9%.
| Sometimes the local maximum is enough.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Intelligence requires bigger brains, which comes at a cost -
| huge energy requirement (20% of total for humans), weight
| (for birds), head size (issue for human birth), etc.
|
| Many animals have no need for intelligence/generality since
| they have a very limited behavioral niche (e.g. herbivores,
| crocodiles, sharks), so it wouldn't have evolved in the first
| place, but even for those that do the benefit has to outweigh
| the cost.
|
| If every animal was a generalist they they'd all be in
| competition with each other, so I'd expect if you ran
| simulations you'd find that an ecosystem full of species that
| don't compete head-on is more stable, and therefore likely to
| result.
| boxed wrote:
| I'm going to want to throw in jumping spiders in the mix. They
| are extremely impressive cognitively, especially considering
| their size.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Not vertebrates tho (the article does also mention octopuses as
| an invertebrate example).
| IX-103 wrote:
| I'm guessing the reason birds' brains are so much smaller for a
| given level of intelligence is that there is so much more
| evolutionary pressure to make things lighter when you need to be
| able to fly. Mammals are likely more optimized for resilience and
| less caloric expenditure instead of weight.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Maybe it's like how we (most vertebrates) have blind spots
| built into our eyes due to a quirk of evolution, but some
| animal like squid etc don't... because their eyes have better
| cable management.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Kind of. There was no evolutionary advantage to removing the
| blind spot because brains adapted to compensate for it on a
| much shorter timescale than evolution. So most mammals still
| have the blind spot.
|
| Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary
| advantage in making their brains as small and light as
| possible.
|
| To me, this implies bird brains are likely to be _much_ more
| efficient, both volumetrically and energetically. That 's the
| more fascinating angle, IMO
| lawlessone wrote:
| Human brains have gotten a little smaller since we left the
| stoneage.
|
| Maybe the ours are getting more efficient too.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| in this podcast, its speculated that we have offloaded a
| lot of our intelligence to culture and the collective
| brain. Maximizing individual intelligence is less
| effective than maximizing social interaction and
| knowledge sharing for survival, especially for humans.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcfhrThp1OU
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Or perhaps the solution that evolution selected to solve
| other problems (microsaccades? [1]) also solved this blind
| spot problem.
|
| > Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary
| advantage in making their brains as small and light as
| possible.
|
| I'm not sure about that. Not all birds are as clever as
| crows. Who knows if a few less grams of neurons is worth
| the "IQ" loss, and conversely who knows if a few more grams
| of neurons makes a difference in terms of survival? Not to
| mention that these animals must also have vestigial or
| ridiculously expensive organs or functions (e.g. peacock's
| feather), so maybe they are not so sensitive to weight or
| energy consumption. It is difficult to measure.
|
| I've long been puzzled by the fact that if intelligence was
| such a big advantage - almost like cheating in our case -
| why is it not common? Well, for one thing we wouldn't have
| struggled a lot more to get to the top of the food chain.
| But Evolution is the process of adapting to an environment,
| and sometimes it selects what is "good enough". In a way
| flies are far more successful than us, because there are
| millions of flies for each one of us, and they are more
| likely to survive a planet-scale catastrophic event.
| Sometimes brute-force reproduction works better than more
| neurons.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade
| throwanem wrote:
| Some wasps are about as clever as birds in some ways,
| especially with respect to socially adaptive forms of
| intelligence in social species, such as the ~1Kya
| selective sweep that resulted in members of the P.
| fuscatus species group developing the ability to
| distinguish individual conspecifics by their unique
| facial features. That's pretty impressive for about a
| hundred and fifty thousand neurons, and larger and more
| highly social vespid wasps (yellowjackets and hornets,
| vs. the 'paper wasps' of Polistinae), metabolically able
| to support larger brains, do better still.
|
| Their brains also aren't structured similarly to ours in
| a gross sense, although the so-called "mushroom bodies"
| do appear to serve similar purposes to our cortical "gray
| matter," and if I recall correctly, there is some sense
| that connectome complexity scales proportionately with
| complexity of behavior, though I'm not sure how well this
| has actually been studied.
|
| On a similar note, though their primary eyes aren't
| constructed at all like ours, they do nonetheless exhibit
| a "foveal" area of highest detail and resolution, in the
| regions of their eyes where it does them the most good -
| namely, ahead and below, the latter aiding in
| manipulation with palps, mandibles, and the front pair of
| legs. That's not quite the same as a brain per se, of
| course, but it does also point to the adaptive
| constraints under which evolution has occurred: as flyers
| who construct their own nests and who regularly must
| travel long distances to find all the resources a colony
| needs - _or,_ as peripatetic mammals who came up grazing
| as much or more as hunting and use tools - good eyesight,
| memory, and dexterity are all very valuable, and thus it
| isn 't a great surprise when such species that become
| successful on a cosmopolitan scale show extensive
| development of these traits. The infrastructure on which
| the trait is built may be independently of interest, but
| not being able to understand how such a small
| infrastructure gives rise to such global traits isn't an
| excuse for ignoring the exhibition of the traits.
|
| In light of all that - plus the anecdotes that such a
| close and friendly interest in wasps would tend to yield
| - I've tended to think of intelligence in this sense, or
| capacity for same, as sort of "holographic" in concept:
| if you make a hologram on film and then cut it in half,
| what you get is not two halves of a hologram, but two
| _complete_ holograms, each with lower resolution than the
| parent. I think brains scale the same way, such that what
| you get with a much smaller brain is not so much less
| _breadth_ as less _depth._
|
| I don't really have a clear formulation of the concept,
| or not yet at least, but hopefully you can see at least a
| vague outline of what I'm reaching for. Or that I do, at
| least! Maybe we could think of it as the anthropic
| principle shorn of human chauvinism, if you like.
| embwbam wrote:
| Evolution doesn't care at all if we get to the top of the
| food chain. I think that we, as the dominant species on
| the earth, mistakenly assume that we are the most evolved
| since we are in charge. Which is more evolutionarily
| successful, the human or the wheat plant?
|
| If another mass extinction occurs, we are toast (See "The
| Ends of the Earth"). Relatively minor ecological changes
| may even destroy us. Sapience has not yet proven to grant
| any long-term advantage.
| yencabulator wrote:
| I've learned a good way around this flawed thinking.
| "More evolved" is _purely_ a question of the amount of
| time that the organism has had to evolve. You are more
| evolved than a T. Rex, because you 've had some 66 M
| years more time to evolve. You and that wheat plant out
| there right now are exactly as evolved.
|
| (Assuming life arose on Earth only once. That seems like
| a convenient moment to start the clock.)
| toasterlovin wrote:
| At 20% of the body's total energy budget, I think the null
| hypothesis should probably be that there has been
| significant evolutionary pressure on human brain energetic
| efficiency.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| I'm not so sure. Mammals have a huge energy budget mostly
| because we're endotherms. Humans are also pretty large as
| far as mammals go, and use more energy.
|
| The caloric enrichment of food by cooking probably can
| explain this as well. We got smart enough to cook, which
| gave us more energy from less food to power the brain. At
| that point, the evolutionary advantage of metabolic
| efficiency matters less. It allowed early humans to
| continue developing on the same path, probably increasing
| brain complexity somewhat over time while not focusing as
| much on energy.
|
| But I'm no biologist. I'm just guessing.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Clearly the energetic cost of having large brains was
| worth it for humans from an evolutionary perspective, or
| else we wouldn't have them. But 20% of your energy budget
| is still a very large cost, so if there's a way to
| accomplish the same brain stuff for, say, half the cost,
| you would expect that to be very strongly selected for
| (caloric scarcity being the norm throughout human
| evolutionary history).
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Talking about birds, I'm aware that certain species of parrots
| are considered to have comparative intelligence to a young
| child -- and they usually live a long life.
|
| I wonder whether it is possible to increase their intelligence
| further -- e.g. what if they are really as smart as 4-5 years
| old in one generation and a bit more in the next? Is there a
| way to "eugenics" (I know it's a bad word) birds on
| intelligence?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Many will scoff, but many things that are possible that
| nobody has tried. Especially projects that take decades.
| colechristensen wrote:
| > Is there a way to "eugenics" (I know it's a bad word) birds
| on intelligence?
|
| Of course there is. Develop an intelligence test and remove
| the bottom _x_ percentile from the breeding pool.
| Alternatively develop an environment that gives a competitive
| advantage to intelligence.
| fn-mote wrote:
| With animals this is normally called a "breeding program".
| For example, some dogs are bred for intelligence.
|
| Edit: Historically, there were "hunting birds" kept by the
| wealthy. Even today, but they are much more rare than dogs.
| Training and breeding would be standard practice in that
| environment.
| bloopernova wrote:
| One thought exercise I've had fun with in the past:
|
| We already control dogs' sub-species, so let's say we decide
| to uplift dogs to human level intelligence. How long would it
| take? At what point does it become unethical to modify a
| species that is on the way to intelligence? What does an
| evolved dog look like at different stages of their human-
| forced evolution? A modern dog is what (very rough)
| equivalent to which stage of human evolution?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| As an owner of two border collies I feel like in some ways
| we're already on the very cusp of it starting to get
| creepy. Our female is insanely intuitive and able to figure
| out what's going on in simple sentences (probably mostly
| keywords and tone) and is extremely alert to the things
| going on that might be key to her.
|
| Let's say you breed a dog past toddler level intelligence,
| and a little more conscious, and communicative... How do we
| now feel about them having a lifespan of 10-15 years? It's
| already heartbreaking enough. Imagine if they were _aware_
| of their mortality and short relative lifespans...
| Intralexical wrote:
| I imagine they'd feel about it as we feel towards
| Greenland sharks and Galapagos tortoises.
|
| And perhaps grateful that if they're here for a short
| time, they're blessed to burn all the brighter.
|
| > Imagine if they were _aware_ of their mortality and
| short relative lifespans...
|
| Though you might certainly feel less grief, if there was
| less of them to lose in the first place.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Consciousness is already MALIGNANTLY USELESS[1] in
| humans. Spreading it to other species would be the
| greatest crime in human history.
|
| [1] Ligotti, 2010
| yencabulator wrote:
| > Imagine if they were aware of their mortality and short
| relative lifespans...
|
| Having had dogs live with other dogs growing old and
| passing away, I think this might be a lower threshold
| than understanding (a subset of) human language. Surely
| even without humans, a pack of social animals has
| individuals getting sick and growing old, and that
| changes how they interact with each other. Elephants are
| known to keep visiting bones of relatives over multiple
| years.
|
| I'm personally more surprised at how well my 12-year old
| mutt picks up new routines, and the words that are said
| at the start of the routine, than at the thought that she
| would know that everyone's getting older and will die at
| some point. I'm anecdotally actually quite convinced she
| used to live with older people before -- she comes to
| "take care of me" every time I cough or sneeze.
| nradov wrote:
| Sure, you could run a captive breeding program for parrots to
| select for intelligence (as measured by problem solving or
| trainability or whatever). But there's no "free lunch" in
| genetics. You'll find that strain ends up worse in some other
| attribute. Like maybe they're more aggressive or less fertile
| or have higher rates of cancer or something. There are always
| trade-offs.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I guess we have to wait until we totally understand genes
| before diving into the dark?
| nradov wrote:
| No, but when it comes to running experiments on animal
| subjects we do have to wait for ethics approval from an
| institutional review board.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We have been doing that to animals and plants for
| thousands of years.
| walleeee wrote:
| Engineering a direct/deterministic map from genotype to
| phenotype may not be possible. Networks of gene
| regulation are often complex and interwoven, there are
| translational steps acting upon the genetic code, and
| development is driven not only by genes but
| physical/mechanical/chemical/electrical goings-on.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Parrots in captivity have tons of unneeded survival traits
| to give up.
| lukas099 wrote:
| And potential access to unlimited free calories.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >There are always trade-offs.
|
| This is pseudo-science and a common misconception. There is
| no genetic reason or support for mandatory detrimental
| tradeoffs.
|
| Historic breeding programs often allow side effects as a
| practical matter, but that doesn't mean they are
| detrimental or required.
|
| Sometimes genetic difference is all upside just like a
| mutation can be all downside.
| nradov wrote:
| Citation needed. What examples of captive breeding
| programs do we have where the results were all upside? If
| parrots could be smarter without some corresponding
| disadvantage then why haven't the wild strain ones
| already naturally evolved to that state?
|
| We might be willing to accept the side effects but that
| doesn't mean they won't inevitably occur.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There are tons of dog breeding programs that have no
| downside, it's just the ones that do have a downside that
| are notable.
|
| With respect to wild parrots, it's not obvious that
| improvement is possible, let alone has disadvantage.
| Assuming it is possible, there are numerous reasons why
| it might not already exist. No advantage, low negative
| advantage, negative incremental advantage, and low
| probability are all possible reasons. Not every viable
| state has a viable incremental path to it.
| bluGill wrote:
| > There is no genetic reason or support for mandatory
| detrimental tradeoffs.
|
| That isn't always true. We know in humans there are genes
| that depending on which variation you have, you will
| either be more social or have better memory. According to
| AI I'm thinking of BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic
| Factor), but digging deeper doesn't indicate that is
| correct. Either way there often are trade offs in
| genetics.
|
| Though of course genetics is only one factor. How your
| are raised/taught also makes a difference.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The key word that I am objecting to is always. Trade-offs
| aren't some law of physics, and when they do it isn't in
| some cartoon way that always balances out.
|
| Having trisomy 21 or exons in your myosin genes don't
| give you superpowers in another part of your life. There
| are people with excellent memory and social skills, and
| people that lack both.
|
| By way of analogy, nobody would say that all possible
| airplane designs are equal and there are only trade-offs.
| Some are superior in every possible respect to others.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are however other causes where there really are
| trade offs. We do not know when those cases are.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Of course. Like I said, The key word that I am objecting
| to is always.
|
| The appropriate response unknowns is not to declare that
| tradeoffs are always the case, let alone equal
| dboreham wrote:
| ChatGPT vs DeepSeek.
| AngryData wrote:
| I would also hypothesize that they need less brain because they
| need far less sensory input from their skin and body because of
| their feathers. They can't feel their feathers directly and
| their feathers protect their skin from abrasion and cuts so
| their is no point to really good sensory input from most of
| their skin other than to differentiate feathers for grooming
| and tell if their feathers are being touched or not. A bird for
| example is not going to force its way into brambles or thorns
| that poke their skin or push through brush in search of food
| like a mammal, they either avoid the thorns completely or have
| enough feather protecting them to ignore certain types of
| thorns. If they get into a fight they are relying almost
| entirely on feathers to protect them and any cuts or abrasions
| are often fatal.
| RachelF wrote:
| Bird neurons are typically around 40% of the length, or 1/9 the
| volume of mammalian neurons. This means they have around 9x the
| number of neurons per unit volume.
|
| A large parrot has around the same number of neurons as a
| beagle dog.
|
| Combined with weight savings, this may allow their brains to
| work faster, which is useful for a flight computer.
|
| Birds have other features which are superior to mammals. For
| example, their flow-through lungs allow for more efficient gas
| exchange.
|
| However, having to fly means weight reduction has been a big
| driver of evolutionary compromises. A bird that can fly cannot
| carry large fat reserves around. They are not resilient when
| sick and often die quickly after the onset of visible symptoms.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Your comment made me think of cheetahs. An article once
| claimed that the biggest reason for cheetahs to perish in the
| wild was that at the speed they're running, even a minor
| mistake means they'll take a tendon-tearing or bone-breaking
| tumble, and their speed-optimized bodies are relatively
| fragile. Once they're injured, they are no longer fast, and
| thus lose their one and only predatory advantage.
|
| Humans really are surprisingly strongly generalist, in ways
| many other animals are not.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Cheetahs are sports cars.
| morsecodist wrote:
| I'm in no way an expert but stuff like this is fascinating to me.
| A lot of our perceptions about intelligence are informed by human
| intelligence because it's the only example we have a strong grasp
| on. Having independent examples can help us understand properties
| of intelligent systems in general instead of over fitting on
| systems that are like us.
| lamename wrote:
| This is very cool and lends even more evidence to what has been
| more or less clear in the avian neuro community. This genetic/dev
| evidence in a similar brain region supports previous work by
| Karten (mentioned in the article) and others on bird auditory
| "cortex".
|
| The mantra is "nuclear" or "regional" organization in birds
| rather than layers in mammals, but the anatomy [0, Fig 4] and
| electrophysiology [1] abstract this out in similar patterns.
|
| [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20616034/
|
| [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1408545112
| Balgair wrote:
| Pedantry Alert:
|
| > The mantra is "nuclear" or "regional" organization in birds
| rather than layers in mammals, but the anatomy [0, Fig 4] and
| electrophysiology [1] abstract this out in similar patterns.
|
| Marsupials too! Sort of.
|
| Generally, marsupials are mostly close to other mammals in
| brain structure, but they do have a fair bit less layers and
| some nuclear structures.
|
| Comparative neuroanatomy in vertebrates is, like, _super_
| interesting (to me at least). It really goes to show off
| evolution and how her pressure is really towards more babies -
| however that needs to be accomplished.
| lamename wrote:
| +1 for comparative neuroanatomy indeed
| I_Nidhi wrote:
| It's pretty wild to think intelligence might have evolved more
| than once in vertebrates. The example of birds and mammals both
| developing complex brains is fascinating. It makes you wonder how
| much untapped potential animals might have in terms of
| intelligence that we haven't fully understood yet.
| energy123 wrote:
| > It's pretty wild to think intelligence might have evolved
| more than once in vertebrates
|
| It's an utter bombshell if true. It means intelligence isn't
| "difficult" for evolution to arrive at, significantly
| increasing the odds of other intelligent life in the universe.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It significantly increases the odds if evolution of
| intelligence was the bottleneck, not, say, origin of life
| itself.
| guelo wrote:
| Not difficult when given the common ancestor of birds and
| mammals and a few hundred million years of relatively calm
| environment.
| dboreham wrote:
| Once you have the basic GPU cell design, it's just a case of
| allowing time to run.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While typically both mammals and birds are significantly more
| intelligent than the other vertebrates, it must be not
| forgotten that there exists an overlap in intelligence between
| the smartest reptiles, e.g. varans a.k.a. monitor lizards, and
| the dumber mammals and birds.
|
| So also outside of mammals and birds there are some cases of
| brain evolution towards greater complexity, even if not
| reaching the typical mammal/bird level, and which are likely to
| also correspond to a somewhat different brain structure.
|
| (Off topic, in my opinion, "reptiles", is a term that is
| properly applied only to lizards and snakes. Not only
| crocodiles and turtles are more closely related to birds than
| to lizards and snakes, but also none of them are crawling, as
| implied by the word "reptile". Actually the present crocodiles
| are awkward on land only because they are secondarily adapted
| to an aquatic life. Their terrestrial ancestors were much more
| agile, as still demonstrated by some crocodiles that are even
| now able to gallop.)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "Deep Past" by Eugene Linden is an entertaining novel, even if it
| is not a work of high literature.
|
| It is science/speculative fiction, that started from the author
| wondering about a scenario in which humans had gone extinct 10k
| years ago, before we developed much, if any, material culture. He
| felt that had that happened another intelligent species 1M years
| later would have no idea that we had even existed (different
| story now, of course).
|
| In the book, a discovery on the steppe of Khazakstan leads to
| revolutionary discoveries about very, very old intelligence.
|
| The author has written several non-fiction books on animal
| intelligence.
| programd wrote:
| A similar scenario of a possible ancient industrial
| civilization on Earth was explored in a serious scientific
| paper not too long ago:
|
| "The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an
| industrial civilization in the geological record?"
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
| TMWNN wrote:
| Some of my favorite SCP entries are based on the idea of an
| ancient advanced civilization before recorded history.
|
| <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115>
|
| <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1050> (not main subject,
| but what anomaly references)
|
| <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4001>, then <https://scp-
| wiki.wikidot.com/alexandria-burning>
| palmotea wrote:
| > The findings emerge in a world enraptured by artificial forms
| of intelligence, and they could teach us something about how
| complex circuits in our own brains evolved. Perhaps most
| importantly, they could help us step "away from the idea that we
| are the best creatures in the world," said Niklas Kempynck, a
| graduate student at KU Leuven who led one of the studies. "We are
| not this optimal solution to intelligence."
|
| Some AI startup needs to get this in their marketing, stat.
| titzer wrote:
| It's interesting to think of how bird intelligence is related to
| their perspective. Perching high in branches and taking to the
| skies allows them to see a large overview of the many activities
| of other life forms. They can manage to get relatively safe
| vantage points and just _watch_. The better they get at
| predicting what the low animals on the surface are doing, the
| more opportunities that they have to sneak in and sneak out
| safely to get a meal. Being stuck on the surface as a mammal
| means a more immediate, limited-scope, fight-or-flight reaction
| dominates daily activities, versus a game-board view of many
| interactions.
|
| Bird intelligence makes a lot more sense in that context.
| Swizec wrote:
| > The better they get at predicting what the low animals on the
| surface are doing, the more opportunities that they have to
| sneak in and sneak out safely to get a meal
|
| The most compelling explanation for bird intelligence I've
| read[1] argues that it all stems from social needs. Birds, you
| see, form lifelong pairs. _But they constantly cheat on each
| other_. Keeping track of this cheating behavior, deceiving each
| other, hide their actions, predict what other birds know,
| understanding who will and who won't rat them out to their
| partner, _that_ 's why the intelligence developed. Then once
| you have intelligence, it proves useful for all sorts of
| things.
|
| Many species of bird also use this advanced ability to keep
| track of who knows what for food. They'll hide a stash for
| winter and find it all later. But it's easier to remember where
| your friend hid theirs than to get your own. So a whole arms
| race of deception developed.
|
| [1] The Genius of Birds
| https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/genius-ofbirds
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Funny, I've read the same thing about intelligence,
| particularly trainability, in both rats and dogs. It's driven
| by a social aspect. The existence of a peer group
| necessitates imagination and theory of mind: you have to be
| able to think about what someone else is thinking about. From
| there you can have thoughts like "That big monkey wants me to
| do this thing that we do sometimes and has indicated that
| they'll give me a thing I like if I do it."
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I wonder if there is any kind of bias of perception. If we
| agree with this point, this probably means bankers are much
| more intelligent than engineers, considering the former
| profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe
| thousands of clients throughout their career life, while
| engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do
| communicate with their colleagues but you can see the vast
| gap between the two.
|
| Maybe there are two types of intelligence -- versus humans
| and versus nature.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's a lot more than just two.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| But a banker and an engineer are 2 individual members of
| the same species. Evolutionary pressure to develop a
| specific type of intelligence doesn't apply.
|
| But yes, there are of course many different kinds of
| intelligence.
| desiderantes wrote:
| Please go back to your resting place, Mr Lamarck.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| The obnoxious pro-engineering equivalent of your
| statement is to say that engineers are more intelligent
| because they are held accountable to a higher standard of
| objective truth, one that is judged through the cold eyes
| of physics and math rather than the rosy glasses of a
| strategically cultivated in-group.
|
| It's probably wrong to directly compare these two types
| of specialization. However, we do have an interesting
| social experiment going on: China's bureaucracy leans
| towards engineering backgrounds while the USA bureaucracy
| leans towards legal backgrounds. You can see this in the
| strategies pursued by each side: China pulls large and
| small levers to acquire hard power (in the sense of
| manufacturing capacity, not just guns) while the USA has
| historically been better at pulling large and small
| levers to acquire soft power (and even though tension
| from the Triffin Dilemma is peaking again, that's still
| probably a fair assessment). The next decade will
| probably see a showdown that supports or repudiates the
| "engineer primacy" vs "lawyer primacy" narratives on the
| level of international strategy, even though both will
| obviously still exist and have primacy within their
| respective niches. Interesting times.
| knowitnone wrote:
| but perhaps communicating with millions is just the same
| skill being used over and over again - doesn't make they
| smarter in any way. I can add 1 and 1 a million times
| doesn't make me smarter. Sure, bankers are more skilled
| at understanding money, inflation, investments but
| engineers are more skilled in their field. Take the
| banker and train them in engineering and vice versa, I'm
| sure they'll both be able to handle the job well.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >If we agree with this point, this probably means bankers
| are much more intelligent than engineers, considering the
| former profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe
| thousands of clients throughout their career life, while
| engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do
| communicate with their colleagues but you can see the
| vast gap between the two.
|
| I don't think anything I said about social vs asocial
| species applies to two members of a a single social
| species. I feel like this is one of those intuitive leaps
| that serves as a great reminder that intuitive leaps
| aren't usually good science.
| kkylin wrote:
| Maybe. But at least in mammals, visual information
| processing is a very expensive operation that involves
| coordinated activity across many cortical areas. Vision
| being such a central sensory modality for birds, I do
| wonder if it was a strong driver for the evolution of their
| brains.
|
| Edit: don't mean to imply a contradiction with the social
| interaction hypothesis -- needless to say there can be
| multiple factors that drive evolution in the same
| direction...
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| I just want to agree with you wholeheartedly that there
| are certainly multiple independent factors driving
| intelligence. After all, one of the most asocial groups
| one can imagine, the octopodes, are also at the forefront
| of animal intelligence (and to further your theory, more
| of their brains are dedicated to visual processing than
| we see in humans)
| red75prime wrote:
| The sky is the limit in the intelligence race when
| adversaries are of your own species. Or metabolic constrains
| are the limit.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I firmly believe that it's the root of all run-away
| intelligence. Social species trying to outsmart itself.
| Predator-prey or individual-environment dynamics are just too
| slow to compete with self-referential feedback loop.
|
| Given that we probably won't need to worry about AI getting
| significantly smarter unless we put it with existential
| competition with itself.
| qzw wrote:
| AI companies are definitely pitting their AI models against
| both in-house and external models. Didn't Alpha Zero get to
| some insanely high level in go by only playing against
| itself without any reference to existing go literature? So
| if this generation of AI plateaus at some point, lack of
| competition again other AI won't be the reason.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I don't think it's just about comparing or letting AIs
| compete. It's more about making success of one AI
| dependant on it understanding how other AI works (that's
| uncooperative and has its own goals).
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Given that every evolutionary outcome is about which genes
| survived long enough to produce viable offspring that have
| some of those same genes
|
| A) at all
|
| B) more than others
|
| C) happened to pass on
|
| this makes more sense, since its about sex
|
| every other use of the same skill is happenstance
|
| for example with C), in humans, cancer occurs mostly after
| sexual reproductive periods, so there is no way for that to
| have been weeded out of the population. Demonstrating that
| many non beneficial traits pass on alongside beneficial ones
| and its all happenstance.
| munificent wrote:
| Some species have properties that seem way beyond what would
| be necessary for evolutionary success. For example, an inland
| taipan has enough venom in a single bite to kill 100 people.
| There is no imaginable situation where a taipan is going to
| need to bite an entire village and take them all out. Why on
| Earth did it evolve such insanely strong venom?
|
| When you dig into it, these outliers are often the result of
| an evolutionary arms race [1]. In teh case of the inland
| taipan, they are often prey for mulga snake and perenties,
| who have evolved immunity to their venom. So you've got a
| feedback loop where the taipan keeps evolving stronger venom
| to fight back against predators, who continue evolving
| stronger immunity to the same venom. Run that loop a million
| years and you get a snake who can kill a busload of people.
|
| Human intelligence is another such outlier. I know it's
| popular to talk about how animal intelligence is
| underestimated but even so, human intelligence is just
| _astronimcally_ greater than any other species. Sure a
| squirrel can find a bunch of nuts it buried. Humans have
| built machines and landed them on other planets. Our
| intelligence is orders of magnitude greater than any other
| species.
|
| My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result
| of an evolutionary arms race within the species. Humans are a
| profoundly social species. We are mostly too fragile to
| survive in the wild on our own. The functioning survival unit
| of humans is a hunter-gatherer group. We are sort of like
| eusocial animals like ants.
|
| But unlike ants who can mostly rely on simple chemical
| signals to tell which other ants are part of their anthill,
| we have to rely on social cues. There is a very strong
| incentive to be able to deceive humans in other groups and
| infiltrate or sabotage their group. If you're smart enough to
| sneak in, you can steal a lot or do a lot of damage.
| Likewise, there's an equally strong incentive to be able to
| suss those bad actors out to prevent them from doing that.
| The smarter you are, and the better you're able to remember
| people and describe them to others, the harder it is to get
| taken advantage of.
|
| Turn that evolutionary crank a few hundred thousand years,
| and you get a species so smart that the only other animals
| that can possibly hope to compete with them in terms of
| intelligence are other Homo sapiens.
|
| If we weren't so deeply social, I don't think we'd be so
| smart. We have these huge brains in order to navigate the
| fantastically complex social world which we have in turn
| created by having these huge brains.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race
| hanjeanwat wrote:
| I'd argue that it's not intelligence alone that lets us
| land a machine on the moon -- it's our cooperation, written
| language, learned culture, communication. An individual
| person cannot land a machine on the moon on their own. It
| is not intelligence that produces that, but intelligence
| contained and continually improved upon within a
| superorganism of social culture.
| munificent wrote:
| Yes, but it requires intelligence for cooperation to be
| evolutionarily viable. Dumb but cooperative animals are
| too easy for a freeloader to take advantage of.
|
| And it obviously requires _massive_ intelligence for
| written language and high fidelity communication.
| njarboe wrote:
| Darwin saw sexual selection as so important to evolution and
| that he discusses natural selection and sexual selection as
| different types. Of course sex is part of nature.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| They... What? They tell on each other about cheating? Is that
| actually real? I am very surprised, it seems the kind of
| communication that is pretty complex, not the kind I expect
| birds to be capable of.
| Swizec wrote:
| They do according to the source I linked. At least some
| species seem to, it's not all birds.
|
| You have to remember that "bird" is not like "human", it's
| more like "mammal". Lots of variation between species :)
| yencabulator wrote:
| > Many species of bird also use this advanced ability to keep
| track of who knows what for food. They'll hide a stash for
| winter and find it all later. But it's easier to remember
| where your friend hid theirs than to get your own. So a whole
| arms race of deception developed.
|
| This reminds me of a backyard squirrel anecdote from a decade
| ago.
|
| A squirrel would laboriously dig a hole and hide a nut in it,
| cover it with soil, and tamp down the soil -- until it
| noticed another squirrel watching it from the top of a fence,
| at which point it immediately proceeded to dig up the nut and
| carry it away.
| bitethecutebait wrote:
| funny. and potentially why their DNA decided to not branch off
| any further ... except that one attempt known as "G.G.
| Domesticus" ... although the 'survivability' of the chicken is
| perfectly covered by it being a very efficient protein and
| choline source ... hmmm ...
| glenstein wrote:
| Yes, and perhaps a different way of saying the same thing, but
| traveling long distances to capture prey and, at times, return
| to the nest to feed the young, may invite a proclivity for
| abstract thinking.
|
| It's perhaps not a coincidence that humans have at least
| something in common with birds in terms of evolutionary
| heritage that predisposed us to covering vast amounts of
| terrain.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Intelligence - big brains - is costly, whether in terms of
| metabolic needs (20% of human energy!), head size (human
| birthing difficulty), or weight - an issue for birds.
| Intelligence will only arise where the benefits outweigh the
| costs, which basically means for generalist species that need
| to be highly adaptive to prevailing conditions/resources, not
| just a one-trick optimized machine like a crocodile or cow.
|
| Not all modern birds are intelligent - some like chickens are
| clearly not, which is understandable because they don't need to
| be. However, the sheer variety of habitats and food sources
| utilized by birds (from raptors to penguins, ostriches to
| hummingbirds) would seem to indicate that generality and
| intelligence may have developed early as they were pushed to,
| and able to, explore new environments, and survive climate and
| other challenges over the millenia. Some birds like covids are
| still generalists and therefore highly intelligent, while
| others have settled into much narrower behavioral niches and
| have therefore lost it (or perhaps never had it).
| Taek wrote:
| This comment is giving me "I am very smart" vibes. Yes,
| everything you said was true, but I'm not sure it's adding
| that much value to the discussion and it comes across like
| its correcting GP, who never claimed that all birds are
| intelligent.
|
| In fact, the tone of GP implicitly acknowledges that
| intelligence has a cost, because the post implies that
| intelligence isn't likely to manifest unless there's a clear
| advantage (presumably because intelligence has a cost which
| needs to be overcome by an advantage)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Also, there's what is termed "The Silurian Hypothesis[0],"
| which is a thought experiment about whether or not there was an
| advanced civilization of dinosaurs (in particular, theropods).
| Since birds came from theropods, it's not so far off.
|
| I read that bird brains have a high neural density (lots of
| neurons, packed tight). That's why they can be so smart, with
| such small brains.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| One thing intelligence seems to require is a lot of energy to
| drive it. You have to get that energy from somewhere. Humans
| probably get it by cooking food. Normally animals have to use
| a lot of energy to break down the food, humans solved that by
| using an external energy source to break it down before
| eating it.
|
| Birds need a lot of energy for flying. They don't cook. They
| solved the energy problem by developing the most efficient
| mitochondria on the planet. They pay a fairly high price for
| that in terms of infant mortality, but I guess the ability to
| fly is worth it. It means when they aren't flying, they have
| a lot of excess energy to power an highly intelligent brain.
| They could then use that brain to detect when their mate was
| screwing around, and decide if it was worth ditching them.
|
| That's all guess work of course. I'm no expert, just belly
| button gazing really.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Some of my favorite SCP entries are based on the idea of an
| ancient advanced civilization before recorded history.
|
| <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115>
|
| <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1050> (not main subject,
| but what anomaly references)
|
| <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4001>, then <https://scp-
| wiki.wikidot.com/alexandria-burning>
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Lovecraft's _At the Mountains of Madness_ also posited a
| Cretaceous civilization, although not a dinosaur one.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Definitely not a neuroscientist but I have wondered in the past
| if human's exceptional eyesight/visual processing (compared to
| the rest of the animal world) factors into this intelligence -
| many birds also have extremely good eyesight. It would
| seemingly require a lot of raw processing "power" to see very
| well.
| cryptophreak wrote:
| Selecting any text in the body of the article adds that text to
| your clipboard. Weird.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Doesn't this kinda _have_ to be true? Otherwise we'd need to have
| a common ancestor with birds that was itself intelligent
| jebarker wrote:
| Do we know that that's not true?
| thesuitonym wrote:
| If that were the case, doesn't it seem unlikely that only our
| two evolutionary lines have kept/reintroduced it?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Our common ancestor is a group of small lizards [0] that are
| mostly known for being found inside moss "trees" where they
| seemingly starved to death, and many of their other
| descendents aren't especially intelligent either.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylonomus
| adolph wrote:
| Proving a negative is a fools errand. The fossil record
| developed thus far doesn't support it. Additionally there is
| such intelligence as the Octopus which has an evolutionary
| split much earlier than mammals and birds.
| The last common ancestor of [humans] and octopuses is a
| flatworm that trawled the sea floor 750 million years
| ago. This is the most recent creature that we both
| have a direct line of descent from - it represents the
| point at which we diverged down separate evolutionary
| pathways. To illustrate just how early this was, this
| was 80 million years before any animal showed
| bilateral symmetry - the familiar body plan with a defined
| top and bottom, and right and left; 350 million years before
| tetrapods - the first four legged creatures that gave
| rise to all birds, reptiles, mammals and amphibians -
| came into existence; and 500 million years before the
| emergence of dinosaurs.
|
| https://eusci.org.uk/2020/06/22/an-alien-in-our-sea-a-
| look-a...
|
| Nice book about the topic is "The Deep History of Ourselves"
| by Joseph LeDoux.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Deep-History-Ourselves-Microbes-
| Consc...
| moralestapia wrote:
| How would one infer intelligence from the fossil record?
| programd wrote:
| Behavior can be inferred from the fossil record. There's
| quite a lot of literature on this. For example inferring
| nesting behavior of dinosaurs from fossilized nests and
| where you find them. Or tool use in early hominids.
|
| You need to define what constitutes intelligent behavior
| and we certainly have some of this from studies of human
| evolution - e.g. tool use, emergence of art, burial
| practices, that kind of thing.
| moralestapia wrote:
| How would one infer an octopus' intelligence from the
| fossil record?
|
| Also, could you give a more substantial answer than
|
| >Behavior can be inferred from the fossil record.
|
| ... that's literally the question rephrased as a
| statement, lol.
|
| A concrete example would be appreciated.
| adolph wrote:
| One would not directly. Given measures of intelligence of
| evaluable existing life, work backwards to find last
| common ancestors given evolutionary theory from the
| available fossil record.
|
| This leaves a lot to be desired, in my mind. Examples: *
| Soft tissue organisms may not be well enough preserved to
| be studied. * Can't evaluate intelligence in evolutionary
| dead-ends that no longer exist. * Limited evolution
| theory may miss mechanisms of how intelligence comes
| about, like maybe from something akin to a shared
| toxoplasmosis infection among different species rather
| than each getting there through a random walk.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Cephalopods are likely to have developed a high
| intelligence only not earlier than the Mesozoic era,
| significantly later than the vertebrates.
|
| The original technological breakthrough that has
| differentiated cephalopods from other animals was a shell
| that could be filled with gas, acquiring thus a
| controllable buoyancy.
|
| The early cephalopods had a lifestyle similar with the
| modern Nautilus, floating freely in the water and gathering
| the prey around, unlike the snails and bivalves that had to
| sit on the bottom of the sea because of the weight of their
| shells.
|
| The lifestyle of most ancient cephalopods, like ammonites,
| did not require a great intelligence, so it is unlikely
| that they had developed it. This kind of cephalopods have
| been dominant for a few hundred million years.
|
| That changed only after the apparition of the ancestors of
| octopuses and cuttlefish, which have exchanged their
| protective shell for a greater mobility and which have
| begun to live on the bottom of the sea or close to it,
| where the environment was much more variable and
| challenging for a fast moving animal than in the free
| water, far from obstructions. This is when the high
| intelligence of cephalopods has developed, sometime during
| the middle or even towards the end of the Mesozoic era.
|
| On the other hand, the intelligence of the vertebrates has
| developed a lot after they have conquered the terrestrial
| environment, which was much more complex than the marine
| environment, sometime during the Upper Paleozoic era,
| probably at least one hundred million years before the
| cephalopods.
|
| Also, while your quotation is _grosso modo_ right, it has a
| lot of details that are very wrong.
|
| 750 million years ago there were no animals whatsoever.
| Such ridiculous numbers are sometimes proposed by people
| who do not understand that the so-called "mollecular
| clocks", which are based on the frequency of inherited
| mutations in DNA, are not constant clocks. While the
| frequency of raw mutations in DNA varies only very slowly
| in time (e.g. due to the general slow decrease in the
| ambient radioactivity), only a small fraction of the
| mutations are _inherited_ , because most mutations have bad
| effects, especially in more ancient animals, which had less
| redundant DNA. How bad are the effects, depends on the
| existing competition. When there is no competition, because
| either a new environment has been conquered or because a
| catastrophe has wiped out the competition, than bad
| mutations may not matter and their carriers survive, so
| their descendants inherit those mutations (after collecting
| additional mutations that undo the bad effects). That is
| why all the divergences between animals that have occurred
| after catastrophes or after arriving in new environments
| appear like they could be extrapolated towards much earlier
| intersection points, which are always in conflict with
| fossil data.
|
| Moreover, the common ancestor of vertebrates and mollusks
| was a worm, but it certainly was not a flatworm. There are
| several unrelated kinds of worms that are flat, but their
| flatness is caused by a more recent evolution. Several
| groups of worms have been very small at some time in their
| past, when they became simplified by losing partially or
| totally some of their organs, like the circulatory system
| or respiratory system. Sometime later, they have evolved
| again towards greater sizes, but in all cases of evolution
| reversals identical developments are extremely unlikely.
| Normally different solutions for the same problem are
| found. So most "flatworms" are flat because with this form
| they no longer need the better
| respiratory/excretory/circulatory systems that their
| ancestors may have lost.
|
| The common ancestor of vertebrates and cephalopods was some
| kind of worm, which lived significantly less than 600
| million years ago, during the Ediacaran, which had
| bilateral symmetry and which probably ate only microscopic
| food filtered from the sea water.
|
| Bilateral symmetry is the symmetry that is normal for any
| mobile animal living on the bottom of the sea, while radial
| symmetry is adequate for a sedentary animal. While for
| echinoderms there is no doubt that their radial symmetry
| has evolved from a bilateral symmetry, even for cnidarians
| there are good chances that their radial symmetry has also
| evolved from a bilateral symmetry of their ancestors, after
| the polyps have lost mobility as adults.
|
| Even the fixed sponges, which may have no symmetry, might
| have evolved from mobile ciliated ancestors.
|
| The traditional view of evolution was that all simpler
| forms must be primitive and all complex forms must be
| derived, but now it is clear that evolution towards the
| maximum possible simplification for a given lifestyle is
| more frequent than evolution towards more complex forms.
| Because of that, many groups of animals that were thought
| to be very primitive, like some of the flatworms, may be
| highly evolved, but towards simpler organizations.
| cma wrote:
| There could also be genetic crossover events with things like
| avian flu though presumably we would have already seen it if it
| were there and flu might not have really been common until
| cities etc. where we were already modern humans.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| There's reference to various animals, like crows or bees learning
| to "count" or knowing how to "count". However I'm highly
| skeptical that it's actual "counting".
|
| I think it's just ability to learn based on whether there's more
| or less of something, in most cases. Which if you think about it,
| is an obvious skill all animals must possess in order to make
| decisions. And nothing new.
|
| I don't think those studies are showing true "counting". For
| example as a person I can without counting tell if there's 1, 2,
| 3, 4 or 5 of something, I can tell how many characters are in
| shorter words on glimpse, but that's not counting. These amounts
| are just pattern recognition labels. However I can then use these
| in groups to do actual counting.
|
| Animals certainly must be able to tell if something is smaller or
| bigger, because they must identify whether it's a potential prey,
| or a threat. Already this ability should lead to the ability of
| being able to differentiate between there being 1, 2, 3 or 4 of
| something.
|
| There seems to be studies that are using this idea to prove that
| animals can count.
|
| Ultimately these are the strength of certain stimuli and even a
| simple machine learning algorithm can produce different output
| based on the amount of that signal.
|
| And then talking about planning and self-control. Many animals
| are willing to patiently stand still, waiting for their prey to
| make a move, I don't think it means that they are specifically
| "thinking" about it. A cat can patiently wait for the mouse when
| it notices the hole.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Neuroscience suffers from a rigor problem[0] Sure, you can make
| observations, even good observations, but these can be lodged
| within a mushy, interpretive bed of sloppy speculation, bad
| philosophy, and unexamined assumptions.
|
| For starters, what is intelligence? Because defined one way, you
| could attribute it to virtually anything that responds to the
| environment in some way. Against mechanistic presuppositions,
| you'll be stuck with the impossible Sisyphean task of defining it
| at all (good luck weaving intentionality into mechanistic
| metaphysics; it is no accident that Descartes believed that non-
| human animals lack consciousness - he viewed them in mechanistic
| terms!).
|
| Or consider...
|
| 'they could help us step "away from the idea that we are the best
| creatures in the world"'
|
| '"We are not this optimal solution to intelligence."'
|
| What is meant by "best" and "optimal"? Without _telos_ , you
| cannot speak about anything being best or optimal. There is no
| ordering measure. These are defined with respect to how well
| something attains an end. Is pencil A better than pencil B? You
| can answer that once you define what it means to _be_ a pencil,
| because then you can define what it means to be a _good_ pencil.
| But is a pencil better than an eraser? Meaningless question
| w.r.t. what is intrinsic and essential to each, as they are two
| different kinds of things with two different ends. Measured
| against human purposes, i.e., purposes extrinsic to the things
| themselves? You could say that the pencil is superior, as it more
| directly and fully contributes to the human end of communication
| or drawing or whatever, while the eraser plays a supportive role.
| Or consider perhaps some kind of absolute ontic hierarchy (at the
| very least, human beings can _do_ whatever any other animal can
| through technology, something that permits the extension and
| determination of the human power to act).
|
| "What are the building blocks of a brain that can think
| critically, use tools or form abstract ideas?"
|
| What is an "abstract idea"? How does it differ from a concrete
| image? For example, let's say that after a squirrel perceives a
| tree in its senses, it remembers this perception. Is this an
| abstract idea? What if this squirrel sees another tree and,
| through its squirrel brain, is moved to behave with respect to it
| in a manner similar to the first tree. Does that involve
| abstraction? Does similarity of image entail abstract ideas? If
| the abstract idea of "Tree" is not an image, not a similarity
| between images, and therefore not particular but a universal
| predicate, for instance, and the brain itself is concrete, then
| how can brains entertain abstract ideas that escape concreteness
| and particularity?
|
| Some will no doubt claim that answering these questions is
| precisely what neuroscience seeks to do, but this is confused.
| Yes, neuroscience can shed light on certain neurological
| phenomena, and that's great. But neuroscience also operates
| within "meta-neuroscientific" parameters and makes use of its
| (often hazy) notions in a way that undermine its coherence. These
| require philosophical chops to untangle and analyze.
|
| [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-
| neurobabble...
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Entirely possible we are due for a third try
| fjfaase wrote:
| What would be the reason that birds did not develop language?
| There are birds that have an amazing range of vocalizations, such
| as the Lyre Birds, and there are examples of birds that have
| shown the ability to associate human speech with abstract
| concepts. So, why did some bird specie develop a language and a
| culture heritage. The developed in parallel with mammals. Birds
| too spend some considerable effort in feeding there offspring,
| just like mammals. There are enough examples of young birds with
| almost the size of there parents still following their parents
| around to beg for food.
|
| How would the worlds have looked if some birds would have
| developed language and being able to transmit knowledge to
| sibling and children? Or was it the fact that we have hands that
| we evolved further? It is sometimes argued that language
| developed as part of mate selection. Bird vocalizations
| definitely play that role with birds.
| jes5199 wrote:
| how confident are we that they don't? I hear a song sparrow and
| I can't help but think their calls sound like compressed data,
| almost like a modem
| bluGill wrote:
| Most birds act like they only know a few calls. You get the
| "come mate with me" and the "this is my territory stay out".
| Once in a while a "come help me fight off this predator", but
| there isn't enough detectable variation in either behavior or
| the song to suggest they are doing anything deeper.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Which makes it so strange that some birds seem to have very
| sophisticated vocalizations. Why? How does it serve them,
| and why did they diverge so much?
|
| Take ravens for example. There's one that hangs out in
| trees directly outside of my house now and then. It makes
| new sounds I haven't heard before quite often. I don't hear
| other ravens, so I'm not even sure it's trying to
| communicate. Does it have a social purpose? Is it bored? Do
| the variations express anything at all?
|
| Yet being in a forest with them around, you hear all kinds
| of noises too, and they do it all together. They interact a
| lot. Though my experience is that they use fewer variations
| when they're together compared to the weird one outside of
| my house.
|
| They seem very intelligent regardless. They're such cool
| birds.
|
| Meanwhile most of the other birds around my house, as far
| as my ears can tell, just make the same sounds over and
| over. What does any of it mean?
| nabla9 wrote:
| Birds communicate with signals and that seems to be enough for
| them. They don't generally live in social communities, or hunt
| together.
| bbor wrote:
| Evolution is a stochastic process operating almost entirely in
| the shadowy past, so the scientifically-responsible answer to
| this "why?" question is "we don't know for sure", I think we
| can all agree.
|
| Moving past that to speculate though, I think Chomsky would
| point to two (surely somewhat syncretic) forces:
|
| 1. Evolution is not an exhaustive breadth-first search; even if
| an adaption would be advantageous, genetic affordances can make
| it unlikely on a finite timeline. Theres lots of speculation on
| why humans in particular were well-prepared to evolve language
| for internal deliberation and/or external communication, but
| it's somewhat beside the point here.
|
| 2. Evolution works most quickly in reaction to environmental
| stressors. There's something of a consensus forming around the
| importance of changing climates for our genus (i.e. why aren't
| there other apes in cold regions?), whereas birds were
| inherently afforded a much simpler answer to that stressor:
| migration.
|
| All of that said, I think it's important to highlight an under-
| appreciated fact: the only things we have ever observed using
| language are a) humans, b) possibly other _Homo_ species like
| _Homo Naledi_ , c) LLMs, and--as of the past ~week (!!!)--D)
| possibly Bonobos.
|
| Lots of animals _communicate_ using words /signs, and a
| majority (?) of plant & animal species _signal_ to each other
| and others using scents, colors, shapes, body language, etc.
| But only the above four can intuitively synthesize those signs
| on the fly into contextual phrases -- or, as Chomsky would say,
| "generate an infinite range of output from a finite range of
| inputs".
|
| It's worth caveating that this is absolutely a subjective
| stance based on how you want to use "language", and that a
| sizeable camp of linguists would disagree on that basis. But I
| think the underlying unique quality is important, so Chomsky is
| correct to single it out as "language" -- otherwise, how would
| you even phrase the above question? Birds clearly have complex
| verbal and visual communication already, and "better
| communication" is vague and unsatisfying, IMHO.
| cma wrote:
| Songbirds have a similar circuit in the brain to humans that
| e.g. bonobos/chimps don't have:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Human-and-songbird-MNs-i...
| mppm wrote:
| Some bird species are capable of communicating in proto-
| language that is only a few steps removed from full language
| capability in the human sense, so I think the most likely
| answer is "accident of evolution". If the primates didn't take
| over the Earth, maybe evolved parrots would have, given a few
| more million years.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| Advanced intelligence may have evolve multiple times, but
| wouldn't the origins of simpler intelligence lie much deeper in
| the evolutionary tree? If Octopi use neurons too, it seems
| obvious to me that rudimentary intelligence must have originated
| in or before the common ancestor of vertebrates, octopi and
| squids: flatworms. Or going back even further, perhaps even all
| the way to single cellular life which often seems to be able to
| react in complex ways to stimuli. Even our brains seem to still
| make use of forms of processing within the cell, isn't there
| intelligence in those cells? Or do we have some agreed on
| definition of intelligence that excludes these simpler forms?
| ane wrote:
| Alex, the bird mentioned in the article, is also the first animal
| ever to have asked a question. When shown its reflection in a
| mirror, it asked what color it was.
|
| We've trained chimps and gorillas for decades and they have never
| asked a single question
| ralphc wrote:
| If "A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as
| a chimp with a 400-gram brain," as the article says, what does
| this say about dinosaurs, which appear to be the ancestors of
| birds but are larger creatures? What was their intelligence like?
| lamename wrote:
| Oddly, what tends to matter for competence in X domain in
| relation to the brain isn't the absolute size of the brain (or
| brain region) but size relative to 1. The other structures in
| the brain 2. Total brain size relative to body size
| TMWNN wrote:
| My question is related to this. The article implies that the
| separate evolutionary track that resulted in birds is more
| _advanced_ than the one that led to primates and us. Given
| that, would a bird with a 3lb brain be smarter than a human?
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| I don't think intelligence is a coherent enough concept to be
| considered to have evolved once, let alone twice.
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