this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2022
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Maybe, but I don't believe that redundance is the reason of the bigger volumen. Certainly there is no need of the whole brain for a relative normal life (a lot of people prove this, some of them became even presidents). I think in another simil, if you have a holographic photo and you cut it in pieces, every piece has the full picture informacion, but in a very lower resolution each one. As I say before, in the nature no exist the redundance, it's a question of energy which guide the evolution. They don't give more resources as needed for the good life in it's environment.
I'd argue that the brain volume alone is not nearly as important as how it's wired. There are lots of animals with high brain volumes that aren't terribly intelligent. While there is evolutionary pressure to optimize energy use, there is also a competing pressure to make the system more robust. Having redundancy means that the brain can survive more severe trauma creating an evolutionary advantage. Meanwhile, birds have a stronger selection for optimization since they have to be able to fly and hence why I think we see more efficient brain architecture emerge.
Yes, whales have a bigger brain, but not in relation to their boddy mass. They are also animals with considerable intelligence, although not as much as those of the Delfinoid family, such as Dolphins and Orcas, whose brains in relation to their body mass is much higher and also much more complex.
Yeah, we tend to underestimate the intelligence of other animals and use anthropocentric perspective when thinking about intelligence.
Agree, even animals where we say that thay don't have inteligence, they have more than the people think.
https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=UDtlvZGmHYk
Oh yeah Portia is amazing. This is a great article about its cognition from Peter Watts.