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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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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?

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.

Plus octopi, which evolved some degree of intelligence in a very different way than vertebrates. So we have at least three paths to intelligence now.

This is an indication that fᵢ in the Drake Equation [1] is probably closer to 1 than 0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Doesn't this kinda _have_ to be true? Otherwise we'd need to have a common ancestor with birds that was itself intelligent

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.

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.

I always thought there was a very basic intelligence proof that the biologists & neurologists overlooked. Engineering.

What are humans? If we focus on early-noticed similarities with Great Apes, people often took to saying "We are the tool users", but "We are the builders" is maybe just as accurate. We produce not just jackhammers, but skyscrapers. Tool users modify their environment adaptively for utility, builders modify their environment adaptively for utility. The evidence is in the works.

Building a stacked stone house requires creating an abstract concept of a future dwelling you would like to have, figuring out how the wall works in that dwelling, modifying the wall according to the layout of the terrain, finding and modifying the appropriate piece of stone that works in the correct position, and then iterating on this piece by piece as each stone provides a slightly different opportunity for the next stone. It requires persistence in pursuit of that abstract goal much longer than routine biological feedback loops; We're talking about a delayed gratification "Marshmallow Test" because you don't get to enjoy sanctuary from the weather until you're done. It requires a consciousness of the environment, the available tools, one's one's own limitations, and the shifting outlines of a hypothetical future. There's literal Gantt Chart type prioritization and preparation involved. I don't see how this could possibly be less complex cognitively than a mirror test.

A number of of animals build nests, piece by piece in the fashion of a human rather than purely through biological secretions. I argue that all of them, even the really weird ones (eg ant nests), are in one sense intelligent.

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.

I'm going to want to throw in jumping spiders in the mix. They are extremely impressive cognitively, especially considering their size.

(I own chickens. There's an "Ur-chicken".)

The thing that jumped out at me in the article was this implied definition of "intuitive":

"In mammals, brain development follows an intuitive path: The cells in the embryo’s amygdala region at the start of development end up in the adult amygdala."

So let me see if I understand: Here is rock on hill. Rock stays on hill, or rock falls down hill. Because it's intuitive.

I'm not sure I agree that that's what "intuitive" means.

Not sure what's meant by "intelligence" or "twice" here, since the study in question (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv2609) concerns the pallium in both birds and mammals. So it seems something about the basal pallium in reptiles was suitable to give rise to bird pallia and the mammalian isocortex, under suitable evolutionary pressures.

Articles like these are tricky. It's an obvious clickbaity thing. Humans knew birds are smart since way before science decided to call itself science.

I think the text plays more on hammering the "nothing makes sense in biology except for the light of evolution" thing than on the roots of intelligence.

The purpose and definition of intelligence have always been a critical point in evolutionary biology.

No mention of the foxp2 gene and the peculiarities of both human and bird variants? Seems like this would open a point for an opposite conclusion (there is a common root if you consider language part of what constitutes intelligence).

In the sixties, birds were girls, cats were boys, and everyone was kind of an asshole. Why should I trust any kind of research that started back then? :) If we're gonna be weirdly anacronistic, let's at least be clear about it. I am more of a 2025 person.

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.

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?

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

> 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.

Entirely possible we are due for a third try

Selecting any text in the body of the article adds that text to your clipboard. Weird.

I always say that the bird brain is the die shrink of ours.

I don't think intelligence is a coherent enough concept to be considered to have evolved once, let alone twice.

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...