This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
> This means that for a given unit of time, shorter reproduction cycles and more offspring results in faster adaptation which is what OP meant and what the unhelpful pedantry doesn’t describe.
There's no indication that this is what the OP meant. If the OP meant that, they'd be saying that birds evolved faster, not that they had an ancestor that evolved a very long time ago, which is a meaningless statement.
I agree one should interpret what people say charitably, but there's a difference between that and just pretending that someone made a totally different claim in order to make a nonsense statement seem less silly.
If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt.
Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that that bird species has been subjected to adaptation pressures for longer (though this, too, is too simplistic; adaptation pressures are not uniformly distributed).
This, of course, starts getting into philosophical questions about the notion of "species". Modern biology has a poor grasp of what it means to be a species. The biological literature alone contains about 20 different operating definitions. To reconcile evolution with the notion of species, some have argued that all or almost all living things belong to a single species, but we're actually seeing a resurgence of functionalist/teleological notions in biology today, because it turns out you cannot explain or classify living things without such notions.
Birds have areas of the brain that we would consider language alike. Both for native bird communication and I would also speculate that for human to bird communication.
If you have ever owned a parrot this is blatantly obvious since they actively communicate and vocalize both observations and needs/desires
Its part of their calling social members wiring....
Parrots can't speak fluent English, which shouldn't be surprising. Last I checked, no human is fluent in Parrot or Dolphin.
Though, at least one parrot may have demonstrated an ability to understand language at more than a surface level.
The author takes forgranted the claim of intelligence; and does not assess at all whether the researcher simply said those words to the parrot every night. (Why not? It sounds exactly like what a researcher would tell a parrot before turning off the lights.) A quick search on Wikipedia says the parrot was also found dead in the morning, not in the implied "parrot has last words" scenario.
Bender•1h ago
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
pcthrowaway•28m ago
Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving
yieldcrv•24m ago
And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary
octopi bucking that trend is an example we need
tokai•13m ago
Nevermark•17m ago
It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.
This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.
No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.
--
Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relative independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.
We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.
--
For exhibited intelligence per time, I don't think any other creature including humans comes anywhere near them. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.
To learn all that, without any mentoring, in the order of a year, along with their body plan, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.
It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.
If there is a candidate for "smarter than humans" in any dimension, it is the octopus.