Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability.
I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.
I work on some aspects of intelligence in birds, primarily in songbirds. There have been some effort finding general intelligence ("g" cognitive factor) in birds since last 15-20 years. The results have been mixed as you would expect. Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard.
Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.
If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.
Many animals (including birds, dogs, horses) like the sanctuary and comfort of a cage and choose to use them, but obviously it shouldn't be used like a prison.
I feel similarly about cats. I absolutely love cats but I didn’t have one for five years because I refuse to own one in an apartment. It seems like people torture animals to make sure that they have some attention when they get home
A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out.
Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.
That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
> A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically.
And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
I have a 3-story ADU (yeah, it’s weird) with access to a forested area behind.
One day Seven of Nine might be eaten by a raccoon but I’ve seen the GoPro footage, she has a blast every day of her life. As a side-effect benefit, she doesn’t play games with me because her entire world is filled with games she can play herself. We still sleep curled up together though :)
Apartment is no good for a cat but suddenly fine for you? It isn’t like it is in human nature to live in a shoebox either. Human nature is to live in the sahel, sleep under the stars, forage, and track game. The office and the apartment is genuinely a prison for the human in their evolved element.
> I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage
I'm convinced that people that keep (uninjured) birds in cages are narcissistic sociopaths. This is based on the conversations that I've had with them about it. Life's too short to deal with people like that. I'm thankful for the indicator to avoid them, but I'm sad that it's at the expense of a bird.
Birds are highly optimized. For example, all cells contain a full genome. The genomes in birds are a lot smaller - less trash DNA - which saves them weight and generally makes the cells more efficient.
Fun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.
That's fun. Octopii rolls off the tongue though, doesn't it? Since we have survived both the Greek and Roman cultures, and have absorbed aspects of both into languages now widely distributed, I'd like to propose that we seed the path of a true lingua franca and declare the plural of octopus to be octopii.
It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.
Neurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard.
And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?
It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope.
Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons.
Something interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny.
It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.
This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.
No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.
--
Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.
We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.
--
For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.
To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.
It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.
The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.
(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)
--
There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.
This code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product!
"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.
No its pretty well understood that brain size in it self doesn't signify intelligence, even if correcting for body size. Density, connectedness, and complexity are important. Modeling the information processing capacity of animal brains it is shown that smaller brain like those of octopi and corvides are highly capable despite a relative low neuron count compared to humans.
Been to NZ once. Keas are indeed the coolest parrots ever. Climb to the top of Avalanche Peak and you’re guaranteed to see some soaring in the sky, with snowy Mt. Rolleston in the background. Kiwis call them alpine parrots, but they are not. They were common on both islands before Polynesian/Maori hunted many of them, and European ranchers forced them to retreat to high beech forests and alpine zones. Another place is Dart Hut, I even found some kea feathers there.
Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.
I've not spent significant time with border collies, but I'd say that if I had to rank, multiple species of corvids are smarter than german shepherds (a breed I'm more familiar with).
That seems like an unfounded inference. Plenty of animals have more neurons than humans but lesser cognitive and language abilities. Language has lot to do with structure of the brain in addition to neuron count.
One thing I've learned by following a link from elsewhere in this thread is that while the total count of neurons in an animal's nervous system is not a good proxy for intelligence, the count of neurons in the forebrain is. By that measure, only the orca ranks higher than humans [1].
That doesn't mean language ability is a natural outcome of crossing a certain threshold of brain complexity; if anything it's more likely the other way around: this complexity being be driven by highly social behavior and communication.
Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.
If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires
This reminds me of being told dogs don't feel emotions by someone who never owned one. Parrots most definitely can talk. Their language is extremely primitive but if you've ever been around a grey and it's owner for some time, they definitely talk to each other. The parrot will readily communicate observations and desires.
Common misconception. Parrots are much more than just mimicry machines. There is also Apollo the parrot that shows this in detail and following from Irene's research with Alex
Isn't that what humans do too? We mimic noises we've heard before and we associate meaning to the noises. Parrots can do that. Our quaker parrot would bite you, then say 'not supposed to bite'. He clearly associated some kind of meaning to that phrase.
Bumblebee (the Transformer) might have an objection here. Purposeful mimicry can be used for talking on certain complexity. It does not have to be human-level to be communication.
I mean, isn’t that just what you’re doing too? If you see a cow, and you’ve been taught that ‘cow’ is the sound that describes a cow, don’t you say “cow?”
> Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
Ah yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)
In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom.
That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.
I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt.
This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
I suspect the more significant difference here is the selection pressures. Take a good look at any part of a bird and you'll see millions of years of selection for reduced weight.
The cost of weight is just so much greater when you're flying. Interesting too that bats tend to have lower neuron counts than say rodents.
Did dinosaurs have a more weight efficient brain before flight, or were they forced to shrink before re-evolving that complexity in a smaller package?
Most of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds.
> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.
I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.
It's unclear what you're saying or how it responds to the OP and his critics.
If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.
Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).
This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.
If you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.
Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability.
I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.
I work on some aspects of intelligence in birds, primarily in songbirds. There have been some effort finding general intelligence ("g" cognitive factor) in birds since last 15-20 years. The results have been mixed as you would expect. Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard.
Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.
If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.
Many animals (including birds, dogs, horses) like the sanctuary and comfort of a cage and choose to use them, but obviously it shouldn't be used like a prison.
I feel similarly about cats. I absolutely love cats but I didn’t have one for five years because I refuse to own one in an apartment. It seems like people torture animals to make sure that they have some attention when they get home
A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out.
Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.
That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
> A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically.
And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
If you’ve ever had a cat that is adamant about trying to escape you might feel differently.
> That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
Yeah like “back up from door” not “poor baby just wants to be free.”
What difference would a house make here? A yard?
I have a 3-story ADU (yeah, it’s weird) with access to a forested area behind.
One day Seven of Nine might be eaten by a raccoon but I’ve seen the GoPro footage, she has a blast every day of her life. As a side-effect benefit, she doesn’t play games with me because her entire world is filled with games she can play herself. We still sleep curled up together though :)
cats hate stairs
I've had cats that love stairs. They'd play and slide down them on purpose.
Pretty sure cats love climbing things, and stairs are no different.
But then you did get one?
Yes. After buying a house with a yard, a pool, and a few trees.
Apartment is no good for a cat but suddenly fine for you? It isn’t like it is in human nature to live in a shoebox either. Human nature is to live in the sahel, sleep under the stars, forage, and track game. The office and the apartment is genuinely a prison for the human in their evolved element.
Yes but I can leave whenever I want.
Can you? Leave in the middle of every work meeting next month and see what happens.
You are not arguing in good faith. A work meeting is a commitment I made of my own volition and is only possible because I /can/ leave my apartment.
I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.
The only one who is arguing in bad faith are the ones equating a cat chilling in an apartment to some form of slavery.
> I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage
I'm convinced that people that keep (uninjured) birds in cages are narcissistic sociopaths. This is based on the conversations that I've had with them about it. Life's too short to deal with people like that. I'm thankful for the indicator to avoid them, but I'm sad that it's at the expense of a bird.
https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510
One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots.
Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before.
"You be good".
Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.
Parrot owner here. This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm actually a bit surprised they cared about the gyms!
This fits right into the ABC model of parrot psychology:
https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_lib...
Birds are highly optimized. For example, all cells contain a full genome. The genomes in birds are a lot smaller - less trash DNA - which saves them weight and generally makes the cells more efficient.
Adding to this a chart of neuron count [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Interesting... I would have thought Octopi have more total neurons than dogs, given their problem-solving capabilities.
Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving
Fun fact: octopus does not come from Latin, which would give the plural an -i ending. It comes from Greek, which means that if you want to be particularly correct about your plurals, then the plural is octopodes.
That's fun. Octopii rolls off the tongue though, doesn't it? Since we have survived both the Greek and Roman cultures, and have absorbed aspects of both into languages now widely distributed, I'd like to propose that we seed the path of a true lingua franca and declare the plural of octopus to be octopii.
It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.
They are all already in use https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus
octopurs
Neurons are used for more tasks than just problem-solving. Dogs have a good smell, so a big part of their brain is probably used for just this. They seem to be also much more acrobatic and reacting faster in general than an Octopus, so theses are probably also areas where additional neurons are used. Dogs have also a high social intelligence, not sure how Octopi are in that regard.
And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?
> reacting faster in general than an Octopus
It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope.
Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
Something interesting about the octopus is that it is independent and learning from the time it is tiny.
It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.
This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.
No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.
--
Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.
We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.
--
For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.
To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.
It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.
The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.
(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)
--
There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.
Yeah their nerve cells are much larger. The axons of a giant squid are up to a millimeter in width.
This code base is larger, so it’s certainly a smarter product!
"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.
[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...
The prevailing research is “more neurons = intelligence”
And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary
octopi bucking that trend is an example we need
No its pretty well understood that brain size in it self doesn't signify intelligence, even if correcting for body size. Density, connectedness, and complexity are important. Modeling the information processing capacity of animal brains it is shown that smaller brain like those of octopi and corvides are highly capable despite a relative low neuron count compared to humans.
I’d be interested in crafting a more neural optimal, less resource intensive human
This is Alex the parrot, mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldYkFdu5FJk
Been to NZ once. Keas are indeed the coolest parrots ever. Climb to the top of Avalanche Peak and you’re guaranteed to see some soaring in the sky, with snowy Mt. Rolleston in the background. Kiwis call them alpine parrots, but they are not. They were common on both islands before Polynesian/Maori hunted many of them, and European ranchers forced them to retreat to high beech forests and alpine zones. Another place is Dart Hut, I even found some kea feathers there.
Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.
Most people don't know it, but birds actually are optimizing against rotational inertia far more than they're optimizing for mass.
Otherwise they would barely be able to eat or drink; their stomachs are far larger and can be far heavier than their brains.
Why would inertia need to be optimized? Think a little bit.
I've not spent significant time with border collies, but I'd say that if I had to rank, multiple species of corvids are smarter than german shepherds (a breed I'm more familiar with).
“More neurons = intelligence” always felt like an oversimplification. If that were true, we wouldn’t be surprised by birds or octopuses anymore.
It's not a 1:1 relationship but they are related.
Parrots are definitely smart, but birds generally pack a lot into a small mass. That's required for flight.
Reminds me of:
https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-15.h...
> Scans reveal a fluid-filled cavity in the brain of a normal man.
Given parrots can talk, there must be a neuron count that activates language (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.
That seems like an unfounded inference. Plenty of animals have more neurons than humans but lesser cognitive and language abilities. Language has lot to do with structure of the brain in addition to neuron count.
One thing I've learned by following a link from elsewhere in this thread is that while the total count of neurons in an animal's nervous system is not a good proxy for intelligence, the count of neurons in the forebrain is. By that measure, only the orca ranks higher than humans [1].
That doesn't mean language ability is a natural outcome of crossing a certain threshold of brain complexity; if anything it's more likely the other way around: this complexity being be driven by highly social behavior and communication.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02855-9
Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.
If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires
Where do you get the conclusion from, that there is a "must"? There can be lot's of neurons ... but dedicated to other purposes.
Parrots can't "talk". They just mimick noises they've heard before
This reminds me of being told dogs don't feel emotions by someone who never owned one. Parrots most definitely can talk. Their language is extremely primitive but if you've ever been around a grey and it's owner for some time, they definitely talk to each other. The parrot will readily communicate observations and desires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)
Common misconception. Parrots are much more than just mimicry machines. There is also Apollo the parrot that shows this in detail and following from Irene's research with Alex
Isn't that what humans do too? We mimic noises we've heard before and we associate meaning to the noises. Parrots can do that. Our quaker parrot would bite you, then say 'not supposed to bite'. He clearly associated some kind of meaning to that phrase.
Many animals can communicate.
Parrots can't speak fluent English, which shouldn't be surprising. Last I checked, no human is fluent in Parrot or Dolphin.
Though, at least one parrot may have demonstrated an ability to understand language at more than a surface level.
Bumblebee (the Transformer) might have an objection here. Purposeful mimicry can be used for talking on certain complexity. It does not have to be human-level to be communication.
This is also what toddlers do until bit by bit they're repeating everything you say back to you in context.
So do we, otherwise we would all speak our own individual language.
So what you’re saying is that parrots are stochastic parrots.
You've just described most of the information economy.
This thread is going to end with Monty Python jokes.
Like Starlings do.
I mean, isn’t that just what you’re doing too? If you see a cow, and you’ve been taught that ‘cow’ is the sound that describes a cow, don’t you say “cow?”
Lots of birds can talk, not only the very clever ones like parrots and covids. Its mimicry and that generally doesn't seem to take many neurons.
Plausible, and likely similar.
mimicking is not talking....
Its part of their calling social members wiring....
Given parrots eat their own poop (https://lafeber.com/pet-birds/questions/parrots-eating-poop/), there must be a neuron count/density that activates self-poop eating (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.
Dogs do that too.
My dogs eat poop, and therefore are also like LLMs.
Your hypothesis has therefore been peer-reviewed.
Flying and taxi-driving primates pack twice as many neurons as parrot brains of the same mass.
is this a straight-up advantage, or is the trade-off lower connectivity?
> Dr. Irene Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex for 30 years. Alex could identify objects, colours, shapes, and numbers. He understood abstract concepts like "same" and "different." His vocabulary exceeded 100 words. When he died in 2007, his last words to Pepperberg were reportedly "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow." I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off.
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
Ah yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)
iirc there’s a similar mythos around coco the gorilla
> Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment.
Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.
One fact that I find very curious is that I see all sorts of animals killed on the road, but never chickens. And I see plenty of them by the road.
Maybe they never try to cross roads?
They definitely cross roads.
In the mountains around Trondheim, Norway, you run into free range chicken farms (and sheep roaming the mountain top). Signs warn you that chickens are about and I think them getting hit is a real concern if you are maximizing chicken freedom.
That said, these aren't busy roads. The more traffic, the more barriers to keep the animals from getting hit.
"Chicken" is also an idiomatic synonym for "frightens easily." They do have some instinct for avoiding danger.
or perhaps it's an artefact of them having a higher contrast against the asphalt and being somewhat fat and puffy compared to most roadkill animals
Chickens are not dumb, check out:
https://thehumaneleague.org/article/are-chickens-smart https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5306232/
bird brains are a die shrink of mammalian brains.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term “stochastic parrots” for LLMs :)
If you haven't seen Apollo on YT, crazy
What is it made out of? meTUL
Want a pistach
He's so charming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8-ZmuJixIg
I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.
Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt.
This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
I suspect the more significant difference here is the selection pressures. Take a good look at any part of a bird and you'll see millions of years of selection for reduced weight. The cost of weight is just so much greater when you're flying. Interesting too that bats tend to have lower neuron counts than say rodents. Did dinosaurs have a more weight efficient brain before flight, or were they forced to shrink before re-evolving that complexity in a smaller package?
Most of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds.
> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.
I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.
Of course, it gets more complicated when you also consider susceptibility to mutations.
It's unclear what you're saying or how it responds to the OP and his critics.
If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.
Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).
This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.
Whatever humans are descended from existed during the time of the dinosaurs
If you go a bit farther back, we all ultimately come from the same lizard-like amniotes, newly emerged onto land from amphibious ancestors. It just took dinosaurs and mammals a little bit to evolve out of the "four-legged monster with teeth" body type.
But we and dinosaurs share a descendant that already had neurons/a brain?