DRAFT: Do Birds Do It Much Better? (Intelligence, That Is), & Other Topics Related to the Deep Substrate of Economic History
Behind the paywall because I am profoundly dissatisfied with it. Birdbrains & human gains: intelligence, culture, & deep biocultural evolutionay roots of economic history…
The story of economic history begins with the evolution of minds, not markets. And not with the evolution of individual minds either. The story properly begins with the biocultural evolution of the time- and space-binding Mind that is humanity considered as an anthology intelligence. It is the peculiar, contingent evolution of that and its capacity for cumulative culture that sets off the possibility of the process. The “market” is merely a latecomer, a surface ripple atop the vast ocean of social learning, language, and trust that made Homo sapiens the protagonist of the coming of the Anthropocene.
The last time I taught my global economic history course, I found myself wishing that I had spent a full two weeks on humanity the coming of agriculture: one class on the jump to our intelligence, one class on our sociability and the jump to our being a cultural-evolution environment-transforming animal, one class on the jump to language as we know it and the the difference we think that made, and one class on the gatherer-hunter lifestyle, the last out-of-Africa migration, and the runup to agriculture and herding. But I do not know when I will.
So it is time to see if there is stuff in my notes that I should get out there, in the hope that somebody in the future (maybe me) will run across it and use it in some way. As Niccolo Machiavelli says, “if [my] poor talent, little experience… and weak knowledge… makes this… not of much utility, it will at least show the path to someone who with more virtue, more discourse and judgment”.
Dp birds do it much better? “It” begin intelligence?
In terms of bang for the buck, that is. As Yasemin Saplakoglu reports:
Yasemin Saplakoglu: Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals <https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals-20250407/>: ‘Complex neural circuits likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times…. . 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… with brains… smaller [that]… lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence. “A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain…. How is it possible?”… The mature circuits looked remarkably alike… but they were built differently…. The mammalian neocortex and the avian [pallium and within it the] d[orsal ]v[entricular ]r[idge] developed at different times, in different orders and in different regions of the brain…. Birds and mammals independently evolved brain regions for complex cognition…. Octopuses… “evolved intelligence in a way that’s completely independent.” Their cognitive structures look nothing like ours…. Yet octopuses have been caught performing incredible feats such as escaping aquarium tanks, solving puzzles, unscrewing jar lids and carrying shells as shields…
The crow and the veined octopus are about 1 kg each, the domesticated dog about 20 kg; chimp is about 50 kg, the human 70 kg, the ostrich 110, the elephant 4000, and the blue whale 120,000 kg.
The brain of the crow is about 10g, of the veined octopus 30, of the dog 60, of the chimp 400, of the human 1300, of the ostrich 35, of the elephant 5000, and of the blue whale 8000 g.
The veined octopus has about 0.5 billion neurons—most of them in the arms—the crow 2 billion, the dog 2 billion; the chimp 28 billion, the human 80, the ostrich 2, the elephant 250, and the blue whale 15.