Re: Bird Brains

[Nick Longrich <nrlongri@midway.uchicago.edu>]

>    I just read an article in Discover about parrots who (African Grays)
>who do
>not mimik speach, they understand what they are saying and are capable of
>thinking in the abstract.  They recognize that reflections in a mirror imitate
>reality, for instance (a skill which humans do not have until age two).  They
>can recognize patterns and make predictions of future events based on the
>patterns (red circle, red square, red triange, what color will the next shape
>be?)  All this they do with a little bird brain, _much_ smaller in relation to
>body mass than a monkey's.  Is it possible that avian brains are wired to
>make a
>more efficiant use of space than mammalian brains are?  Also, what does
>this say
>about dinosaurian brains?

        I guess I wouldn't be surprised if they were more efficient. If you
think about it, reducing mass is a pervasive selective pressure in birds
since it allows them to stay airborne with less power expended. Hence the
pneumatic bones with tubular or sandwich construction, hollow feathers,
and quite likely other things like glandless skin, fusion of bones into
notaria/ carpometacarpi/ synsacra/ tarsometatarsi/ pygostyles; lack of
teeth, seasonal atrophy of gonads, etc. etc. All of this means less stuff
you have to work to keep airborne. If you can find a way to increase the
strength/weight ratio of your skeleton (fusing elements, hollowing, tubes,
sandwiches, etc.) who is to say that you couldn't optimize your brain and
neurons to be more compact and lighter as well? Well, a neurologist, which
I'm not. So I'm pretty much wildly speculating here. But it seems plausible
to me. In this sense, birds would be the lightweight business laptops of
the animal kingdom, and mammals, the bulky desktops.
        All the same, we may be comparing apples and oranges. Think of a
PlayStation vs. a desktop. The PlayStation is a cheap machine which is
really, really good at graphics but pretty lousy at anything else. The
desktop is equal or maybe somewhat inferior in graphics performance
depending on various hardware, but it does a lot more besides, like
crashing Windows (or, if you prefer, Mac OS). I think most people would say
that overall the desktop is a more powerful machine. Considering that birds
come from a long line of visually oriented critters- unlike primates, which
come from nocturnal things- perhaps it makes sense that they are really
good at processing visual information. The Sony PlayStations of the animal
kingdom? It may be that they do some things really well, but have serious
deficiencies we haven't yet recognized. The same may be true of humans-
when it comes to scents, our dogs must think we're idiots. As for
dinosaurs- well, I'd guess that parrots are somewhat unusual among birds
and birds are somewhat unusual among dinosaurs. But they do say that we
have a lot to learn and that some highly sophisticated behaviors can appear
in animals with relatively small brains.
        An interesting point that one of my professors made is that most of
the really bright animals you can think of- parrots, dolphins and orcas,
apes (including ourselves), dogs- live in groups/packs/pods/societies. The
argument might boil down to something like the idea that herbivores are
dumb (plants are easy to outwit), carnivores are smarter (herbivores are
harder to outwit than plants) and social animals are smartest (you're
dealing with an animal that is used to dealing with other animals). Parrots
are highly social, for example. Again, though, what you mean by smart is
pretty hard to define.