{"id":213786,"date":"2025-05-11T13:14:56","date_gmt":"2025-05-11T18:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/intelligence-on-earth-evolved-independently-at-least-twice"},"modified":"2025-05-11T13:14:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-11T18:14:56","slug":"intelligence-on-earth-evolved-independently-at-least-twice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/intelligence-on-earth-evolved-independently-at-least-twice","title":{"rendered":"Intelligence on Earth Evolved Independently at Least Twice"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions, and think critically. But we can\u2019t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan<\/a> for the future, crows count<\/a> and use tools<\/a>, cockatoos open and pillage<\/a> booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track<\/a> of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They\u2019re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cA bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,\u201d said Onur G\u00fcnt\u00fcrk\u00fcn<\/a>, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. \u201cHow is it possible?\u201d<\/p>\n

Researchers have long debated about the relationship between avian and mammalian intelligences. One possibility is that intelligence in vertebrates\u2014animals with backbones, including mammals and birds\u2014evolved once. In that case, both groups would have inherited the complex neural pathways that support cognition from a common ancestor: a lizardlike creature that lived 320 million years ago, when Earth\u2019s continents were squished into one landmass. The other possibility is that the kinds of neural circuits that support vertebrate intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions, and think critically. But we can\u2019t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}