Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think of how bird intelligence is related to their perspective. Perching high in branches and taking to the skies allows them to see a large overview of the many activities of other life forms. They can manage to get relatively safe vantage points and just watch. The better they get at predicting what the low animals on the surface are doing, the more opportunities that they have to sneak in and sneak out safely to get a meal. Being stuck on the surface as a mammal means a more immediate, limited-scope, fight-or-flight reaction dominates daily activities, versus a game-board view of many interactions.

Bird intelligence makes a lot more sense in that context.

View on HN

> The better they get at predicting what the low animals on the surface are doing, the more opportunities that they have to sneak in and sneak out safely to get a meal

The most compelling explanation for bird intelligence I’ve read[1] argues that it all stems from social needs. Birds, you see, form lifelong pairs. But they constantly cheat on each other. Keeping track of this cheating behavior, deceiving each other, hide their actions, predict what other birds know, understanding who will and who won’t rat them out to their partner, that’s why the intelligence developed. Then once you have intelligence, it proves useful for all sorts of things.

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.

[1] The Genius of Birds https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/genius-ofbirds

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."

I wonder if there is any kind of bias of perception. If we agree with this point, this probably means bankers are much more intelligent than engineers, considering the former profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe thousands of clients throughout their career life, while engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do communicate with their colleagues but you can see the vast gap between the two.

Maybe there are two types of intelligence -- versus humans and versus nature.

It's a lot more than just two.

But a banker and an engineer are 2 individual members of the same species. Evolutionary pressure to develop a specific type of intelligence doesn't apply.

But yes, there are of course many different kinds of intelligence.

Please go back to your resting place, Mr Lamarck.

The obnoxious pro-engineering equivalent of your statement is to say that engineers are more intelligent because they are held accountable to a higher standard of objective truth, one that is judged through the cold eyes of physics and math rather than the rosy glasses of a strategically cultivated in-group.

It's probably wrong to directly compare these two types of specialization. However, we do have an interesting social experiment going on: China's bureaucracy leans towards engineering backgrounds while the USA bureaucracy leans towards legal backgrounds. You can see this in the strategies pursued by each side: China pulls large and small levers to acquire hard power (in the sense of manufacturing capacity, not just guns) while the USA has historically been better at pulling large and small levers to acquire soft power (and even though tension from the Triffin Dilemma is peaking again, that's still probably a fair assessment). The next decade will probably see a showdown that supports or repudiates the "engineer primacy" vs "lawyer primacy" narratives on the level of international strategy, even though both will obviously still exist and have primacy within their respective niches. Interesting times.

Soft power is essentially a euphemism for influence, which in the best case is necessary but not sufficient.

Er...I'm not saying engineers are smarter than bankers. I'm just saying "smart" is a bit of too broad of a word.

And I'm just following the original logic, so I don't see what's wrong here. If you are not happy about the conclusion, I politely point to the original post/reply.

but perhaps communicating with millions is just the same skill being used over and over again - doesn't make they smarter in any way. I can add 1 and 1 a million times doesn't make me smarter. Sure, bankers are more skilled at understanding money, inflation, investments but engineers are more skilled in their field. Take the banker and train them in engineering and vice versa, I'm sure they'll both be able to handle the job well.

>If we agree with this point, this probably means bankers are much more intelligent than engineers, considering the former profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe thousands of clients throughout their career life, while engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do communicate with their colleagues but you can see the vast gap between the two.

I don't think anything I said about social vs asocial species applies to two members of a a single social species. I feel like this is one of those intuitive leaps that serves as a great reminder that intuitive leaps aren't usually good science.

Maybe. But at least in mammals, visual information processing is a very expensive operation that involves coordinated activity across many cortical areas. Vision being such a central sensory modality for birds, I do wonder if it was a strong driver for the evolution of their brains.

Edit: don't mean to imply a contradiction with the social interaction hypothesis -- needless to say there can be multiple factors that drive evolution in the same direction...

I just want to agree with you wholeheartedly that there are certainly multiple independent factors driving intelligence. After all, one of the most asocial groups one can imagine, the octopodes, are also at the forefront of animal intelligence (and to further your theory, more of their brains are dedicated to visual processing than we see in humans)

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

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.

AI companies are definitely pitting their AI models against both in-house and external models. Didn’t Alpha Zero get to some insanely high level in go by only playing against itself without any reference to existing go literature? So if this generation of AI plateaus at some point, lack of competition again other AI won’t be the reason.

I don't think it's just about comparing or letting AIs compete. It's more about making success of one AI dependant on it understanding how other AI works (that's uncooperative and has its own goals).

Hold on, I've got a great pitch for an AI startup...

Given that every evolutionary outcome is about which genes survived long enough to produce viable offspring that have some of those same genes

A) at all

B) more than others

C) happened to pass on

this makes more sense, since its about sex

every other use of the same skill is happenstance

for example with C), in humans, cancer occurs mostly after sexual reproductive periods, so there is no way for that to have been weeded out of the population. Demonstrating that many non beneficial traits pass on alongside beneficial ones and its all happenstance.

It can if having non-dead grandparents gives an advantage before reproduction occurs. Could be why we live longer than most species too.

Some species have properties that seem way beyond what would be necessary for evolutionary success. For example, an inland taipan has enough venom in a single bite to kill 100 people. There is no imaginable situation where a taipan is going to need to bite an entire village and take them all out. Why on Earth did it evolve such insanely strong venom?

When you dig into it, these outliers are often the result of an evolutionary arms race [1]. In teh case of the inland taipan, they are often prey for mulga snake and perenties, who have evolved immunity to their venom. So you've got a feedback loop where the taipan keeps evolving stronger venom to fight back against predators, who continue evolving stronger immunity to the same venom. Run that loop a million years and you get a snake who can kill a busload of people.

Human intelligence is another such outlier. I know it's popular to talk about how animal intelligence is underestimated but even so, human intelligence is just astronimcally greater than any other species. Sure a squirrel can find a bunch of nuts it buried. Humans have built machines and landed them on other planets. Our intelligence is orders of magnitude greater than any other species.

My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species. Humans are a profoundly social species. We are mostly too fragile to survive in the wild on our own. The functioning survival unit of humans is a hunter-gatherer group. We are sort of like eusocial animals like ants.

But unlike ants who can mostly rely on simple chemical signals to tell which other ants are part of their anthill, we have to rely on social cues. There is a very strong incentive to be able to deceive humans in other groups and infiltrate or sabotage their group. If you're smart enough to sneak in, you can steal a lot or do a lot of damage. Likewise, there's an equally strong incentive to be able to suss those bad actors out to prevent them from doing that. The smarter you are, and the better you're able to remember people and describe them to others, the harder it is to get taken advantage of.

Turn that evolutionary crank a few hundred thousand years, and you get a species so smart that the only other animals that can possibly hope to compete with them in terms of intelligence are other Homo sapiens.

If we weren't so deeply social, I don't think we'd be so smart. We have these huge brains in order to navigate the fantastically complex social world which we have in turn created by having these huge brains.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race

I'd argue that it's not intelligence alone that lets us land a machine on the moon — it's our cooperation, written language, learned culture, communication. An individual person cannot land a machine on the moon on their own. It is not intelligence that produces that, but intelligence contained and continually improved upon within a superorganism of social culture.

Yes, but it requires intelligence for cooperation to be evolutionarily viable. Dumb but cooperative animals are too easy for a freeloader to take advantage of.

And it obviously requires massive intelligence for written language and high fidelity communication.

I think that there are two sides of an intelligence, intelligence as an inborn ability to become intelligent and intelligence as the result of the process of becoming intelligent. People are more intelligent then animals in the first sense, AND they developed a process of training the "raw" inborn intelligence into an adult mind.

> My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species.

Frans de Waal studied primates and defended just this hypothesis. He wrote a bunch of books, so you may be interested in reading at least some of them.

BTW, my pet hypothesis is the social roots of our intelligence is the reason why people mostly hopelessly dumb. They kinda go on intuition and it works in normal social situations, but when it comes to politics or science the intuition fails them. One needs to train their mind to stick to logic and rationality, without taking sides which seem the most beneficial for them. But training is hard and training can easily be overcome by the intuition, which is the natural way for brain to work. You need to keep your brain working against its nature to not lose your intelligence in situations which are not hierarchy games.

I suspect we are not orders of magnitudes more intelligent than some of our cetacean friends in the deep sea.

At the end of the day, all the achievements you've listed are not only the result of massive intelligence but opposable-thumb hands (for tool use and writing) and fire (for an easy early source of energy to runaway with).

If humans were just as intelligent but never had these, we'd never reach the moon or build machines.

Taipan venom evolved to take down small mammals, and it's just by accident that it is so toxic for humans.

There's no need for taipan venom to be as strong as it is just to kill a little long-haired rat.

That's a consequence of its attack style, it doesn't just strike the prey and then retreat, it actively subdues it and doesn't let go.

So there's an evolutionary pressure to make venom as fast acting as possible so that the prey has fewer chances to injure the snake before dying.

Black mamba in Africa is in a similar situation. It's an arboreal snake, so its toxic venom helps it to hold on to the prey.

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.

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.

They do according to the source I linked. At least some species seem to, it's not all birds.

You have to remember that "bird" is not like "human", it's more like "mammal". Lots of variation between species :)

> 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

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.

Also, "cheating" is common in many species, including other birds, and it doesn't seem to affect their reproduction enough to justify evolving cheater powers; as spicy as that hypothesis may be.

I also agree that it makes more sense that pressure to become smarter is linked to prediction and preservation, as they're fragile creatures. A wounded mammal could crawl inside its nest and heal, a wounded bird is likely a dead bird.

> 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?

I recommend reading the linked book from a bird expert who has been studying this for her entire career. I promise it is much better and deeper than my comment here.

It links to 266 references (papers) at the end. I just checked

Also, there's what is termed "The Silurian Hypothesis[0]," which is a thought experiment about whether or not there was an advanced civilization of dinosaurs (in particular, theropods). Since birds came from theropods, it's not so far off.

I read that bird brains have a high neural density (lots of neurons, packed tight). That's why they can be so smart, with such small brains.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

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.

An important factor is bird lungs, which essentially have a mechanism which keeps the lungs perpetually inflated. Air flows through. This makes it possible to provide way more oxygen to the body than our own inefficient lungs. Which again makes it possible for birds to fly over the Himalayas and still get enough oxygen to drive those power-hungry mitochondria.

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>

Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness also posited a Cretaceous civilization, although not a dinosaur one.

> They can manage to get relatively safe vantage points and just watch.

It's that, and more. When I walk under the trees outside, the corvids at the top make a specific noise. I'm pretty sure they're telling each other "Look out, mammal on the loose down below!"

Yes, and perhaps a different way of saying the same thing, but traveling long distances to capture prey and, at times, return to the nest to feed the young, may invite a proclivity for abstract thinking.

It's perhaps not a coincidence that humans have at least something in common with birds in terms of evolutionary heritage that predisposed us to covering vast amounts of terrain.

Definitely not a neuroscientist but I have wondered in the past if human's exceptional eyesight/visual processing (compared to the rest of the animal world) factors into this intelligence - many birds also have extremely good eyesight. It would seemingly require a lot of raw processing "power" to see very well.

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.

It's also a problem if resolution. Birds see a little of everything while mammals see more of something.

funny. and potentially why their DNA decided to not branch off any further ... except that one attempt known as "G.G. Domesticus" ... although the 'survivability' of the chicken is perfectly covered by it being a very efficient protein and choline source ... hmmm ...

Intelligence - big brains - is costly, whether in terms of metabolic needs (20% of human energy!), head size (human birthing difficulty), or weight - an issue for birds. Intelligence will only arise where the benefits outweigh the costs, which basically means for generalist species that need to be highly adaptive to prevailing conditions/resources, not just a one-trick optimized machine like a crocodile or cow.

Not all modern birds are intelligent - some like chickens are clearly not, which is understandable because they don't need to be. However, the sheer variety of habitats and food sources utilized by birds (from raptors to penguins, ostriches to hummingbirds) would seem to indicate that generality and intelligence may have developed early as they were pushed to, and able to, explore new environments, and survive climate and other challenges over the millenia. Some birds like covids are still generalists and therefore highly intelligent, while others have settled into much narrower behavioral niches and have therefore lost it (or perhaps never had it).

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)

GP's whole thesis was that bird intelligence is related to their high-in-the-sky perspective and prey tracking, which is wrong. If this was the case then the smartest birds would be raptors.

The need for intelligence comes from being a generalist, needing to learn and apply a large complex set of situation dependent rules. This is why specialists like raptors, chickens, penguins are not renowned for their intelligence. A good outward sign of intelligence is playfulness, a trait evolved to put the player in learning situations to feed their intelligence. Animals like apes, dolphins and crows are all very playful. Eagles not so much.

So, yeah, I was correcting GP. If you don't like it, then too bad.

Cows are quite intelligent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com