Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals

The findings emerge in a world enraptured by artificial forms of intelligence, and they could teach us something about how complex circuits in our own brains evolved. Perhaps most importantly, they could help us step “away from the idea that we are the best creatures in the world,” said Niklas Kempynck, a graduate student at KU Leuven who led one of the studies. “We are not this optimal solution to intelligence.” Birds got there too, on their own. Pecking Disorder For the first half of the 20th century, neuroanatomists assumed that birds were simply not that smart. The creatures lack anything resembling a neocortex — the highly ordered outermost structure in the brains of humans and other mammals where language, communication and reasoning reside. The neocortex is organized into six layers of neurons, which receive sensory information from other parts of the brain, process it and send it out to regions that determine our behavior and reactions. In the 1960s, the neuroanatomist Harv ... Read full article.