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At Quanta, science writer Yasemin Saplakoglu explores the thesis that intelligence evolved at least twice in vertebrate animals. We’ll get to the specifics but first I’d like to focus on the opening paragraph:

Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan for the future, crows count and use tools, cockatoos open and pillage booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.

“Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals,” April 7, 2025

Putting our intelligence on a pedestal?

Wait. How did we lose track of the fact that humans are studying birds, using both abstractions and critical thinking (not to mention sophisticated equipment). Birds get on with their lives by cleverly solving problems. But they are not studying us that way — because they can’t.

Image Credit: luckybusiness - Adobe Stock

A discussion of animal intelligence that refuses to acknowledge the human exception becomes a script for suppressing discussions we need to have about our place in the world.

One of Saplakoglu’s interview subjects harps on the same theme:

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.” “Evolved at Least Twice”

The evolution of nonsense

Kempynck is doubtless an intelligent man. But here he is talking nonsense. It is a nonsense imposed on him by the unquestioned philosophical commitments of evolutionary biology. If he started uttering common sense, he would be deplatformed.

He can’t think — let alone say — the obvious. So once again, I will: We are not “this optimal solution to intelligence.” We belong to a different order of intelligence from all other life forms. We fly — by building aircraft. We don’t howl at the moon; we go there.

Whatever the human difference is, it makes a huge difference, one in which all the contributors to “Evolved at Least Twice” participate, without being free to acknowledge it.

Whether we are the “best creatures” on the planet is a logical dead end. If several other species had the capacity for abstract thought and moral choice, we might have (one hopes) a friendly rivalry. Because we are all alone in this regard, we can vote ourselves whatever titles or putdowns we want — the drama changes nothing.

It is ironic that otherwise intelligent people must play the “we’re just another animal” game while demanding the attention to their work that only humans can give.

Leaving humans out of the picture for a moment…

The question of whether birds developed intelligence separately from mammals hinges on how the various brain parts currently believed to be associated with intelligence formed. Recent papers delving into the matter offer some useful new insights:

A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found. “Evolved at Least Twice”

As Saplakoglu notes, that pattern is consistent with convergent evolution. It’s also consistent with intelligent design in nature: achieving the same goal using quite different neural structures.

An article at Science introduces the topic, pointing to current papers:

On pages 733, 734, and 732 of this issue, Zaremba et al. (1), Hecker et al. (2), and Rueda-Alaña et al. (3), respectively, provide evidence for the convergent development and evolution of neurons and their connections in the bird and mammalian pallia, highlighting the need for multiple perspectives in brain comparative studies.

Giacomo Gattoni, Maria Antonietta Tosches , Constrained roads to complex brains. Science 387,716-717(2025). DOI:10.1126/science.adv2609

Saplakoglu’s article provides a valuable overview of the study of bird intelligence. She covers both the predominant view in the first half of the twentieth century — that birds are not as intelligent as mammals — and the successful challenges to that view. For example,

“A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,” said Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “How is it possible?” “Evolved at Least Twice”

How indeed? It may be time for a rethink of what animal intelligence is.