A large parrot has around the same number of neurons as a beagle dog.
Combined with weight savings, this may allow their brains to work faster, which is useful for a flight computer.
Birds have other features which are superior to mammals. For example, their flow-through lungs allow for more efficient gas exchange.
However, having to fly means weight reduction has been a big driver of evolutionary compromises. A bird that can fly cannot carry large fat reserves around. They are not resilient when sick and often die quickly after the onset of visible symptoms.
Humans really are surprisingly strongly generalist, in ways many other animals are not.
A 200gram grain-fueled homing pigeon can maintain 60km/h for an hour. A cheetah can do that for maybe a minute.
I've always thought this is not really a fair comparison, as flying through the air probably requires way less energy than sprinting.
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
Maybe the ours are getting more efficient too.
> Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary advantage in making their brains as small and light as possible.
I'm not sure about that. Not all birds are as clever as crows. Who knows if a few less grams of neurons is worth the "IQ" loss, and conversely who knows if a few more grams of neurons makes a difference in terms of survival? Not to mention that these animals must also have vestigial or ridiculously expensive organs or functions (e.g. peacock's feather), so maybe they are not so sensitive to weight or energy consumption. It is difficult to measure.
I've long been puzzled by the fact that if intelligence was such a big advantage - almost like cheating in our case - why is it not common? Well, for one thing we wouldn't have struggled a lot more to get to the top of the food chain. But Evolution is the process of adapting to an environment, and sometimes it selects what is "good enough". In a way flies are far more successful than us, because there are millions of flies for each one of us, and they are more likely to survive a planet-scale catastrophic event. Sometimes brute-force reproduction works better than more neurons.
Their brains also aren't structured similarly to ours in a gross sense, although the so-called "mushroom bodies" do appear to serve similar purposes to our cortical "gray matter," and if I recall correctly, there is some sense that connectome complexity scales proportionately with complexity of behavior, though I'm not sure how well this has actually been studied.
On a similar note, though their primary eyes aren't constructed at all like ours, they do nonetheless exhibit a "foveal" area of highest detail and resolution, in the regions of their eyes where it does them the most good - namely, ahead and below, the latter aiding in manipulation with palps, mandibles, and the front pair of legs. That's not quite the same as a brain per se, of course, but it does also point to the adaptive constraints under which evolution has occurred: as flyers who construct their own nests and who regularly must travel long distances to find all the resources a colony needs - or, as peripatetic mammals who came up grazing as much or more as hunting and use tools - good eyesight, memory, and dexterity are all very valuable, and thus it isn't a great surprise when such species that become successful on a cosmopolitan scale show extensive development of these traits. The infrastructure on which the trait is built may be independently of interest, but not being able to understand how such a small infrastructure gives rise to such global traits isn't an excuse for ignoring the exhibition of the traits.
In light of all that - plus the anecdotes that such a close and friendly interest in wasps would tend to yield - I've tended to think of intelligence in this sense, or capacity for same, as sort of "holographic" in concept: if you make a hologram on film and then cut it in half, what you get is not two halves of a hologram, but two complete holograms, each with lower resolution than the parent. I think brains scale the same way, such that what you get with a much smaller brain is not so much less breadth as less depth.
I don't really have a clear formulation of the concept, or not yet at least, but hopefully you can see at least a vague outline of what I'm reaching for. Or that I do, at least! Maybe we could think of it as the anthropic principle shorn of human chauvinism, if you like.
If another mass extinction occurs, we are toast (See "The Ends of the Earth"). Relatively minor ecological changes may even destroy us. Sapience has not yet proven to grant any long-term advantage.
(Assuming life arose on Earth only once. That seems like a convenient moment to start the clock.)
The caloric enrichment of food by cooking probably can explain this as well. We got smart enough to cook, which gave us more energy from less food to power the brain. At that point, the evolutionary advantage of metabolic efficiency matters less. It allowed early humans to continue developing on the same path, probably increasing brain complexity somewhat over time while not focusing as much on energy.
But I'm no biologist. I'm just guessing.
I wonder whether it is possible to increase their intelligence further -- e.g. what if they are really as smart as 4-5 years old in one generation and a bit more in the next? 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.
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.
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?
Let's say you breed a dog past toddler level intelligence, and a little more conscious, and communicative... How do we now feel about them having a lifespan of 10-15 years? It's already heartbreaking enough. Imagine if they were aware of their mortality and short relative lifespans...
And perhaps grateful that if they're here for a short time, they're blessed to burn all the brighter.
> Imagine if they were aware of their mortality and short relative lifespans...
Though you might certainly feel less grief, if there was less of them to lose in the first place.
[1] Ligotti, 2010
Having had dogs live with other dogs growing old and passing away, I think this might be a lower threshold than understanding (a subset of) human language. Surely even without humans, a pack of social animals has individuals getting sick and growing old, and that changes how they interact with each other. Elephants are known to keep visiting bones of relatives over multiple years.
I'm personally more surprised at how well my 12-year old mutt picks up new routines, and the words that are said at the start of the routine, than at the thought that she would know that everyone's getting older and will die at some point. I'm anecdotally actually quite convinced she used to live with older people before -- she comes to "take care of me" every time I cough or sneeze.
This is pseudo-science and a common misconception. There is no genetic reason or support for mandatory detrimental tradeoffs.
Historic breeding programs often allow side effects as a practical matter, but that doesn't mean they are detrimental or required.
Sometimes genetic difference is all upside just like a mutation can be all downside.
We might be willing to accept the side effects but that doesn't mean they won't inevitably occur.
With respect to wild parrots, it's not obvious that improvement is possible, let alone has disadvantage. Assuming it is possible, there are numerous reasons why it might not already exist. No advantage, low negative advantage, negative incremental advantage, and low probability are all possible reasons. Not every viable state has a viable incremental path to it.
Most genotypes or "random mutations" are totally neutral for an organism, but let's say that of the notable ones, it's 50/50 whether they will be "good" or "bad".
If we find the "good" smart parrot, it's likely they have some other "bad" stuff we can't see or just don't care about. When you keep inbreeding, that other bad stuff will be fixed along with the intelligence. This is purely a limitation of our knowledge of the genome and lack of other inputs. You can out-cross to reduce the bad traits, but you risk losing some of the intelligence too. Theoretically there is another bird out there that solves the "bad" trait without affecting intelligence, we just don't know which it is.
Nothing stops you from having a win-win-win. You could randomly find a bird that is super smart with rainbow feathers and the voice of an angel... It's just incredibly unlikely to roll all those attributes in one individual and keep them through multiple generations.
As to why wild populations haven't naturally evolved to be smarter, that is an entirely separate discussion about countless competing selection pressures and how genes spread through larger populations.
That isn't always true. We know in humans there are genes that depending on which variation you have, you will either be more social or have better memory. According to AI I'm thinking of BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor), but digging deeper doesn't indicate that is correct. Either way there often are trade offs in genetics.
Though of course genetics is only one factor. How your are raised/taught also makes a difference.
Having trisomy 21 or exons in your myosin genes don't give you superpowers in another part of your life. There are people with excellent memory and social skills, and people that lack both.
By way of analogy, nobody would say that all possible airplane designs are equal and there are only trade-offs. Some are superior in every possible respect to others.
The appropriate response unknowns is not to declare that tradeoffs are always the case, let alone equal