RE: How smart are birds?
April 17, 2014 at 11:40 am
(This post was last modified: April 17, 2014 at 11:53 am by Anomalocaris.)
(April 17, 2014 at 11:07 am)Darwinian Wrote: Recent studies have shown that many birds, such as the ones shown here, are twice as intelligent as a 54 year old creationist.
So you are saying these birds are dumb as snails?
The functional structure of bird brain is different from mammalian brain. Much of the cognitive activities that mammalian brain use the cereberal cortex to perform is in birds performed in a distributed fashion throughout the cerebellum.
A lot of empirical research into cognitive function of the brain has been done on mammals, so there is a tendency to correlate the thickness, area and infold convolutions of the cereberal cortex, which are entensive in humans, chimps and dolphins, with intelligence. This makes it surprising to many people that birds, with much smaller brains and minimal cerebral cortex, can also perform surprising amount of cognitive function.
