Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals

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."

How does this theory show that birds didn't first become intelligent, and then started cheating because they're now intelligent enough to do it? The "sitting and watching" theory makes a lot more sense to me.

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.

The sky is the limit in the intelligence race when adversaries are of your own species. Or metabolic constrains are the limit.

> 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.

"Lullaby, lullaby, swindles and schemes. Flying's not near as much fun as it seems."

-- Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

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.

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.

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.

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>

Humans have five distinct "visual cortexes" in the brain that process input from the eyes. There's two layers to the system and they provide outputs to various parts of the brain. Your blink and flinch response is highly sensitive to some of these outputs.

Birds have two. One feeds the other. Their field of view for binocular vision is often not large. They completely lack the power to "fill in" details of occluded objects the way that we can. Which is the true power of our vision outside of pure pattern recognition used to find sources of food.

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)

Cows are quite intelligent.

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.

Sounds like a tradeoff to me. Shorter neurons probably means fast operation and small size, but reduced regional and global connectivity. From the little I know about brains, this would imply things like reduced creativity.

My human neurons are inclined to wonder if the results hold true for other flying animals, particularly insects, and of course, bats.

I hope someone else also wonders how smart a human with bird-like neurons would be. I feel weird even thinking about it.

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

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

Many will scoff, but many things that are possible that nobody has tried. Especially projects that take decades.

+1 for comparative neuroanatomy indeed

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>

What I think lends strength to Chomsky's theory is that is virtually, informally a corollary of computational complexity theory (grammars, P = NP, and related ideas) which was a direct consequence of Alan Turing.

So for the camp of linguists that disagree I do wonder what alternative theoretical foundation do they have.

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.

Sounds right to me. If birds started to hunt prey in flocks _then_ there would be an advantage to incrementally increasing communication ability.

Passenger pigeons formed communities that numbered in the millions if not billions.

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

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. 

Nice book about the topic is "The Deep History of Ourselves" by Joseph LeDoux.

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-History-Ourselves-Microbes-Consc...

If that were the case, doesn't it seem unlikely that only our two evolutionary lines have kept/reintroduced it?

> Not only crocodiles and turtles are more closely related to birds than to lizards and snakes

Most fish (bony fish) are more closely related to us than they are to sharks and other cartilaginous fish. Technically we're all air breathing walking bony fish.

It significantly increases the odds if evolution of intelligence was the bottleneck, not, say, origin of life itself.

Not difficult when given the common ancestor of birds and mammals and a few hundred million years of relatively calm environment.

Once you have the basic GPU cell design, it's just a case of allowing time to run.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.