Clever Corvids: the cortical equivalent in many birds (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 25, 2020, 12:32 (1520 days ago) @ David Turell

Thank you for yet another stimulating article. It touches on quite a few of our issues.

QUOTE: So far, it appears that the more neurons there are in the pallium as a whole, regardless of pallial, brain, or body size, the more cognitive capacity is exhibited by the animal. (David’s bold)

This is a major factor in the debate between materialism and dualism. Does consciousness/ intelligence/cognitive capacity arise out of the neurons, or do the neurons multiply in accordance with the demands of a conscious intelligence? (NB that does not mean that our fellow animals have the same DEGREE of consciousness/intelligence as ourselves.) Were ancient corvids as intelligent as modern corvids, and did they have the same number of neurons? No way of knowing. What researchers could find out, though, would be whether corvid brains, just like human brains, complexify in response to new requirements (e.g. when they solve specific problems).

DAVID: We knew birds were smart, and now we know why. Part of me is very interested in the bolded comment at the end. Hominins and homos were in small population numbers before we advanced 50,000 years ago and began to build a large population. This fits Gould's concept of small isolated populations causing rapid or large evolutionary advances.

This was the point I made about the Cape Verde people developing immunity to malaria. We seem to be in agreement, and this has major implications for the whole of evolution. You had asked why humans evolved while apes remained the same, and I responded that conditions may have forced local groups to descend from the trees while elsewhere the apes lived happy ever after.

DAVID: What is weird is that a small population is like to have less mutations than a large population, but large brains appeared anyway. That supports the concept of a driving force like God.

What is weird is that according to you, the driving force behind corvid intelligence and that of every other form of intelligence was your God's one and only desire to design sapiens intelligence. They were all "part of the goal of evolving humans". I would suggest that in all instances, the driving force was the urge of the cell communities to improve their chances of survival by using the intelligence your God may have provided them with from the beginning.

DAVID: The other point is it is teh volume of neurons that make a difference. Size, by itself, is not a major guide to brain capacity as the first bold shows.

Just to link this to our "brain expansion" thread: there is a limit to the number of cells each skull can contain. A corvid presumably wouldn’t be able to fly if its head doubled in size, and so I have proposed that the human skull eventually stopped expanding because further expansion would have created problems for the rest of the anatomy. For other implications concerning volume, see my first comment above.