Intelligent dinosaurs are among us.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
The past few years have had a great deal of research showing extraordinary cognitive abilities in some birds – especially corvids (crows, ravens, jackdaws, and the like) and parrots, who can solve complex puzzles, understand and synthesize language at the level of simple syntax, and display an understanding of object permanence typically reached by humans around age two.
Up to now, there has been a good deal of argument that these are limited tactical skills, usable only in specific contexts but not in general. However, a new review article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, collecting the results of this wide range of research, seems to show fairly definitively that this is not the case: the same kinds of cognitive abilities show up, over and over in these species, no matter what context they find themselves in. These birds have intelligence comparable to those of some apes.
What’s most fascinating about this is that birds’ brains are very little like primates’. Most visibly, they have no neocortex at all – that being the large, highly folded section of the brain which we use for most of our complex thinking. Instead, they seem to do their thinking in the pallium, a part of the brain common to almost all vertebrates, but somehow developed differently in these species.
This could well imply that complex intelligence evolved separately in birds and in mammals, not coming from any shared origin. This would suggest that, like vision or locomotion, abstract thought is a powerful general adaptation which may arise in any number of ways.
Among the corvidae, the pressure leading to this has fairly clearly been that of being clever scavengers – not too different from the pressures which likely led to our own development of such tools. This combination of intelligence and opportunism has also made them highly successful in a human-dominated world: the ecosystem we create is full of tasty treats.
via Pratik Mukherjee
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