Kind of. There was no evolutionary advantage to removing the blind spot because brains adapted to compensate for it on a much shorter timescale than evolution. So most mammals still have the blind spot.
Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary advantage in making their brains as small and light as possible.
To me, this implies bird brains are likely to be much more efficient, both volumetrically and energetically. That's the more fascinating angle, IMO
Or perhaps the solution that evolution selected to solve other problems (microsaccades? [1]) also solved this blind spot problem.
> Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary advantage in making their brains as small and light as possible.
I'm not sure about that. Not all birds are as clever as crows. Who knows if a few less grams of neurons is worth the "IQ" loss, and conversely who knows if a few more grams of neurons makes a difference in terms of survival? Not to mention that these animals must also have vestigial or ridiculously expensive organs or functions (e.g. peacock's feather), so maybe they are not so sensitive to weight or energy consumption. It is difficult to measure.
I've long been puzzled by the fact that if intelligence was such a big advantage - almost like cheating in our case - why is it not common? Well, for one thing we wouldn't have struggled a lot more to get to the top of the food chain. But Evolution is the process of adapting to an environment, and sometimes it selects what is "good enough". In a way flies are far more successful than us, because there are millions of flies for each one of us, and they are more likely to survive a planet-scale catastrophic event. Sometimes brute-force reproduction works better than more neurons.
Evolution doesn't care at all if we get to the top of the food chain. I think that we, as the dominant species on the earth, mistakenly assume that we are the most evolved since we are in charge. Which is more evolutionarily successful, the human or the wheat plant?
If another mass extinction occurs, we are toast (See "The Ends of the Earth"). Relatively minor ecological changes may even destroy us. Sapience has not yet proven to grant any long-term advantage.
I've learned a good way around this flawed thinking. "More evolved" is purely a question of the amount of time that the organism has had to evolve. You are more evolved than a T. Rex, because you've had some 66 M years more time to evolve. You and that wheat plant out there right now are exactly as evolved.
(Assuming life arose on Earth only once. That seems like a convenient moment to start the clock.)
Is it only a matter of time, though? "More evolved" means "more adapted". I think that organisms with fast reproduction cycles generally adapt faster. But it is probably difficult to define a scale for adaptation as well.
Yeah they're an expression of an "evolutionary clock" that ticks faster for species with shorter generations. But then there's also evolutionary pressure from surroundings, niches left empty after disasters, etc, so trying to measure any of that is just not very objective. And you have to remember there is no "goal", no one direction, it's a brownian walk so mutations happening faster doesn't really change anything unless there's enough advantage in them.
Some wasps are about as clever as birds in some ways, especially with respect to socially adaptive forms of intelligence in social species, such as the ~1Kya selective sweep that resulted in members of the P. fuscatus species group developing the ability to distinguish individual conspecifics by their unique facial features. That's pretty impressive for about a hundred and fifty thousand neurons, and larger and more highly social vespid wasps (yellowjackets and hornets, vs. the 'paper wasps' of Polistinae), metabolically able to support larger brains, do better still.
Their brains also aren't structured similarly to ours in a gross sense, although the so-called "mushroom bodies" do appear to serve similar purposes to our cortical "gray matter," and if I recall correctly, there is some sense that connectome complexity scales proportionately with complexity of behavior, though I'm not sure how well this has actually been studied.
On a similar note, though their primary eyes aren't constructed at all like ours, they do nonetheless exhibit a "foveal" area of highest detail and resolution, in the regions of their eyes where it does them the most good - namely, ahead and below, the latter aiding in manipulation with palps, mandibles, and the front pair of legs. That's not quite the same as a brain per se, of course, but it does also point to the adaptive constraints under which evolution has occurred: as flyers who construct their own nests and who regularly must travel long distances to find all the resources a colony needs - or, as peripatetic mammals who came up grazing as much or more as hunting and use tools - good eyesight, memory, and dexterity are all very valuable, and thus it isn't a great surprise when such species that become successful on a cosmopolitan scale show extensive development of these traits. The infrastructure on which the trait is built may be independently of interest, but not being able to understand how such a small infrastructure gives rise to such global traits isn't an excuse for ignoring the exhibition of the traits.
In light of all that - plus the anecdotes that such a close and friendly interest in wasps would tend to yield - I've tended to think of intelligence in this sense, or capacity for same, as sort of "holographic" in concept: if you make a hologram on film and then cut it in half, what you get is not two halves of a hologram, but two complete holograms, each with lower resolution than the parent. I think brains scale the same way, such that what you get with a much smaller brain is not so much less breadth as less depth.
I don't really have a clear formulation of the concept, or not yet at least, but hopefully you can see at least a vague outline of what I'm reaching for. Or that I do, at least! Maybe we could think of it as the anthropic principle shorn of human chauvinism, if you like.
At 20% of the body's total energy budget, I think the null hypothesis should probably be that there has been significant evolutionary pressure on human brain energetic efficiency.
I'm not so sure. Mammals have a huge energy budget mostly because we're endotherms. Humans are also pretty large as far as mammals go, and use more energy.
The caloric enrichment of food by cooking probably can explain this as well. We got smart enough to cook, which gave us more energy from less food to power the brain. At that point, the evolutionary advantage of metabolic efficiency matters less. It allowed early humans to continue developing on the same path, probably increasing brain complexity somewhat over time while not focusing as much on energy.
Clearly the energetic cost of having large brains was worth it for humans from an evolutionary perspective, or else we wouldn't have them. But 20% of your energy budget is still a very large cost, so if there's a way to accomplish the same brain stuff for, say, half the cost, you would expect that to be very strongly selected for (caloric scarcity being the norm throughout human evolutionary history).
I should say: this would be for pure efficiency optimizations absent any other tradeoffs. What I think you should see in birds based on their more extreme body mass constraints vs ground dwellers is different tradeoffs being worthwhile. Like, if there were an adaptation that required slightly more energy, but resulted in a brain that was much lighter; or doing various mental processes 20% less effectively for 50% less brain mass.
in this podcast, its speculated that we have offloaded a lot of our intelligence to culture and the collective brain. Maximizing individual intelligence is less effective than maximizing social interaction and knowledge sharing for survival, especially for humans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcfhrThp1OU
Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary advantage in making their brains as small and light as possible.
To me, this implies bird brains are likely to be much more efficient, both volumetrically and energetically. That's the more fascinating angle, IMO