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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Why larger animals need larger brains to get same intelligence?

In 1960s, Harry J Jerison collected and plotted data on brain size-body size on log scale. He also calculated different fit lines for mammals, birds and reptiles, and they have different slopes, though often slope 2/3 is used for convenience.

While difference between reptile slope and bird slope is probably insignificant, between birds and mammals probably is (about 0.580 vs 0.72 IIRC).

Extrapolating from this data, a 70kg bird might have same intelligence as human with only 400g brain instead of 1400g. A card which birds dinosaurs didn't get to put good use for.

AFAIK, two things come together to give birds small but powerful brains, and better mass/compute scaling:

  1. Cell size can vary between species, and birds have pressure to miniaturize to reduce weight.

  2. Smaller bodies have less stuff (skin, muscles, etc) that need a nervous connection and a part of the brain to process data from and/or issue commands to. See Encephalization quotient. Eg. Women have the same IQ as men, despite having, on average, 90% of the brain size.

EDIT: This post by Scott might be of interest.

But larger men don't have lower iq than smaller men despite similar sized brains, if anything the relationship goes the other way.

There are a lot of relationships in biology that generally hold across species but not within a species. For instance, mammal size is associated with longer lifespan across species, but intra-species it doesn't hold and can even be the opposite, e.g. in dogs.

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