Bird brains (2023)
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Bird brains (2023)
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Re: Bird brains (2023)
#2Adding to this a chart of neuron count [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#3I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#4I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
But we and dinosaurs share a descendant that already had neurons/a brain?
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#5I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
Whatever humans are descended from existed during the time of the dinosaurs
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#6I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#7I have to imagine that given birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which evolved quite a long time ago, they've had a lot more time to optimize certain things.
All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.
Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt.
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.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.
Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt. 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.
Most of our mammal ancestors between us and dinosaur times had likely had extremely short lifespans as well, often shorter than the ancestors of modern songbirds.
> 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.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
All living beings have been evolving for the same amount of time.
Sure, but the speed of change is also related to lifespan. The longer lives you have (technically how long it takes to start reproducing and how many offspring you have), the less time you have to adapt. 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.
Of course, it gets more complicated when you also consider susceptibility to mutations.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#10Given parrots can talk, there must be a neuron count that activates language (assuming anatomy allows it), similar to LLM parameter count.