Now bird brain for the win?

 High Bird Intelligence Is Consistent with Design, Not Evolution

Denyse O Leary

Editor’s note: Pre-order The Immortal Mind by Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary and get a sneak peek exclusive excerpt from the book as well as the full digital book anthology Minding the Brain.

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, 

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.

A discussion of animal intelligence that refuses to acknowledge human exceptionalism 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.

Lizard brain for the win(again)

 Get Smart: Recognizing Reptile Intelligence

Denyse O Leary

Editor’s note: Pre-order The Immortal Mind by Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary and get a sneak peek exclusive excerpt from the book as well as the full digital book anthology Minding The Brain.

At JStor Daily,Matthew Wills, introducing a recent paper, tells us that reptiles are are smarter than we used to think. One reason that biologists used to think that reptiles are of uniformly low intelligence was a misunderstanding about their behavior in captivity:

Herpetologist Gilles De Meester and evolutionary ecologist Simon Baeckens write that, into the 1970s, researchers were dismissing reptiles as “reflex machines,” “intellectual dwarfs,” and creatures of “very small brain.” The latter description implies much — but those implications turn out to tell us more about researchers than the subjects of their studies.

The few earlier studies that seemed to confirm the dumb reptile stereotype had “inadequate and ecologically irrelevant experimental study designs, such as suboptimal room temperatures or insufficient reinforces,” write De Meester and Baeckens. For instance, food, which works well as a motivation for rodents and birds in cognitive tests, seems to have much less appeal to reptiles because of their low metabolic rate and irregular feeding habits. Snakes, as an example, may not want to eat for months after consuming large prey, so a new food source may not interest them at all.

“THE REPTILIAN RENAISSANCE,” APRIL 11, 2025

Clever Reptiles

It turns out that reptiles observed in the wild can be rather clever:

There’s even some evidence of reptilian tool-use: species of crocodiles and alligators “display sticks and twigs on their snout in order to lure nest-building birds.” This has only been observed in bird-breeding season, when the birds on the lookout for sticks to construct or repair their nests.

Once considered simple and “primitive,” the “reptilian brain is now recognized to govern complex behaviours,” write De Meester and Baeckens. They argue that reptiles show “immense potential” as model species for research into the “mechanisms, the development, and evolution of animal cognition.”

“THE REPTILIAN RENAISSANCE”

In  fairness, the fact that reptiles can afford to be torpid much of the time due to their low energy needs probably means that they don’t need to exercise intelligence as often as energy-burning mammals and birds do. But that’s a separate matter from not having intelligence.

The Reptile Brain

Mammals and birds have different types of brains from each others. But if reptiles can demonstrate intelligence similar to that of, say, mammals or birds, is it because they have similar types of brains to either?

At Neuroscience News, Irina Epstein reports that the Max Planck Institute looked at the question in a 2022 paper. They think that a basic ancestral brain developed 320 million years ago when reptiles, birds, and mammals (all tetrapods) moved to land. But the subsequent development of their brains was quite different:

Neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt tackled this question by generating a molecular atlas of the dragon [lizard] brain and comparing it with one from mice.

Their findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief that a mammalian brain consists of an ancient “reptilian” brain supplemented with new mammalian features, both reptilian and mammalian brains evolved their own clade-specific neuron types and circuits, from a common ancestral set. 

“DRAGONS AND BRAIN EVOLUTION,” SEPTEMBER 2, 2022

That suggests that mammals, birds, and reptiles all developed different smart survival strategies on their own. It sounds like convergent evolution or intelligent design.

Complicating the Picture: Evidence for Smart Fish and Invertebrates

The manta ray, which has a rather large brain, also has a reputation for intelligence: From the Daily Mail:

Their large brains are also believed to have engorged regions known to play a role in higher functions, such as intelligence, vision and motor coordination.

In addition, manta rays are known to repeatedly revisit the same feeding areas or so-called ‘cleaning stations’ on coral reefs — where cleaner fish will nibble away any parasitic organisms that have attached themselves to the manta.

This behaviour has led researchers to conclude that mantas are able to creative cognitive maps of their environment to help them navigate back to these preferred locations.

They are also known to be highly curious animals and often initiate play-like behaviour with human divers — a phenomenon otherwise really only seen to such an extent in intelligent social marine mammals like dolphins and whales.

Divers also report that mantas actively solicit help when tangled in lines or injured, rather than the fear response more typical of a vulnerable animal.

“HOW INTELLIGENT ARE MANTA RAYS?” JULY 12, 2019

Other fish can lay claim to intelligence too. So intelligence doesn’t seem to be just a feature of tetrapod evolution.

And then there’s the octopus… Scientists clash over why these invertebrates are smart, as smart as lab rats. And then there are the cuttlefish. And crabs and lobsters too.

But this takes us back be half a billion years. Maybe if we are looking for general principles underlying the development of intelligence, we would be wise to leave evolution out of it for a bit.

Making ID advocates of us all by lowering the bar?

Do Fungi Have Free-Will?

Daniel Witt 

Nicholas P. Money has a bold hypothesis. Money, a professor of mycology at Miami University in Ohio, has argued in a peer-reviewed paper that fungi have minds. 

Whenever a new hypothesis like this is published and calmly debated in scientific journals without arousing any furor, your first instinct may be to scoff: “Why is this absurd thesis acceptable, but intelligent design absolutely anathema?”

Given how often ID theorists have been dismissed without a fair hearing, that reaction is quite understandable. However, given that scientific inquiry is in fact in this sad state, I also think that any case of an out-of-the-box theory being debated civilly is a phenomenon that should be encouraged, not discouraged — especially so when the theory runs against the grain of the old scientific-materialist paradigm. We should consider this kind of thing with an open mind, and expect to receive the same courtesy. 

So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at Money’s argument. Why does he think that fungi think?

Actual Mind, or a Facsimile? 

Before looking at his evidence, we need to clarify something: what does Money mean by mind? Whenever the idea of “mind” come up in a scientific context, I am resigned to expect that mind will be equated with mere computing power — which isn’t really mind at all. The idea of mind is typically thrown around in a very sloppy manner, and its two key elements — experience and will/agency — are vaguely assumed to be emergent properties of physical systems. 

Experience is assumed to arise automatically out of computer-like complexity. No coherent explanation for why is given, and what’s forgotten is that we only know that we possess first-person experience because we get the “inside scoop,” so to speak, from our own experience. A computer that gives certain outputs for certain inputs is only imitating the actions that we have learned (due to that inside scoop) to associate with conscious experience. That carefully crafted imitation is the only reason computers seem conscious, and it doesn’t imply that they actually are conscious (see: philosophical zombies). 

Likewise, discussions of will or agency in science tend to omit the most important part: that free will cannot arise in a strictly deterministic system, or by definition it would not be free will. That means that if any system is alleged to manifest free will, we should in theory be able to find some element (however small) behaving in a way that is not predictable by fixed and inflexible laws.  

Now, to be sure, “fungal mind” would be interesting from an evolutionary perspective either way. If, on one hand, it is a mere computer, with no true mind attached (no experience or will), this would indicate a very high level of complexity and mechanical sophistication; and if, on the other hand, there is a conscious mind involved, then that would strike at the very heart of the pervading scientific-materialist worldview. 

Apparently, Actual Mind!

Given how often scientists (and science writers) ignore these key points, I was expecting Money to present some evidence of extreme complexity and computer like behavior, and equate that with “mind.”

I was pleasantly surprised. Money doesn’t address the metaphysics of experience. But, tentatively — without coming out and saying it in so many words — he seems to want to suggest that fungi might have free will, in the robust sense. He writes:

There is a natural tendency to consider an organism conscious if it appears to engage in decision-making that results in a unique behavioral outcome. Whether or not humans have free will, we take actions that seem willful: she finished her coffee, whereas her friend left her cup half full. On a simpler level, fungi express the same kind of individualistic behavior all the time… Although there is a high degree of predictability in the overall time-dependent form of the emerging fungus, it seems likely that its detailed shape is irreproducible.

Do you see what he’s suggesting? He seems to imply that the growth of the fungus might be non-predictable even in theory. This, in turn, would imply that it is non-deterministic — irreducible to the fixed laws of physics, chemistry, genetics, and so forth — which leaves room for the possibility of either (1) true randomness, or (2) true will or agency in the strict philosophical sense.

This is fascinating, and I do believe it has philosophical merit. (Whether it has experimental merit is a question for other mycology labs to answer.) Money is quite right that the standard way humans intuit free will is by detecting action that cannot be fully explained deterministically by outside causes. 

For example: Imagine you are a great inventor in the 1890s. You’ve created a marvelous automaton that can mimic human behavior. To a casual observer it seems lifelike — but not to you. You as its creator know that it has no true freedom; certain inputs inviolably result in certain outputs. You know that chain reactions in its internal gears and switches produce each action, so you aren’t fooled by the illusion of mind. 

But suppose, one day, the automaton begins to do and say things that you are quite sure you didn’t design it to do (not even by the one-step-removed process of deterministic “machine learning”). How would you react? Most likely, you would be shocked. You would declare (in your 1890s accent), “My creation has come to life!” — and you would be quite justified in your conclusion. 

Likewise, a fungus with behavior that cannot be pinned-down and predicted shows every sign of being alive — in the powerful everyday sense of the word, not merely in the sense we learned in biology class. It’s very hard to prove a negative, and I doubt any mycologist has done so yet (you would probably need to involve a physicist) — but if a fungus’s actions genuinely cannot be reduced to any deterministic process, that suggests free will.  

Building Blocks of a Mind

Like a human brain, a fungal brain with true free will would need to be founded on some basic unit of action that is not strictly deterministic. Money believes the origin of non-deterministic action is found in the hyphae, root-like structures that collectively form a subterranean web called a mycelium. Working together, the simple decisions of the hyphae could result in more complex decision-making for the fungal brain as a whole.  

“If individual hyphae are conscious, what happens when an interconnected colony, or mycelium, of thousands of these cells forms in the soil?” Money asks. “Is a mycelium more than a sum of its parts? Can it be regarded as an integrated conscious entity?” 

As support for this hypothesis, he brings in apparent evidence of complex decision-making capabilities in fungi, including an experiment that seemed to show that when fungi are burned with fire they can remember the experience for up to a day after it occurred and behave differently as a result. 

Money argues that it does injustice to the fungal brain to compare it to even a sophisticated mechanical system such as the Internet. He writes in his conclusion

In this brief essay I have considered fungal expressions of consciousness, including sensitivity, decision making, learning, and memory. This rich behavioral repertoire allows fungi to adapt in real time to changes in environmental circumstances. Our internet shows none of this inherent flexibility. It is a network of pathways that generates nothing on its own. Life outshines the limitations of this drab technology in every cell.

More Philosophical Work Needed

Money is a biologist, not a philosopher, and he is prone to semantic imprecision. For example, he writes: “There is nothing artificial about this intelligence. The continuous flow of information in the live cell would overwhelm the most complex robot.”

You have to wish he would clarify what he means by “artificial.” Most dictionaries define the word as meaning human-made, but since no one to my knowledge believes that fungi were made by humans, this would be an odd thing to assert. I suspect he means something more like “merely mechanical.” It would be helpful for the interpretation of the experimental evidence if qualified philosophers of science get involved in the discussion. 

That said, Money seems to understand the qualitative difference between real mind and mere artifice, and I hope his paper will be the starting point of a deeper inquiry into which kind of “mind” fungi might have. 

As things stand, I don’t claim know whether there truly is any sort of immaterial “fungal mind” — and I doubt that anyone else really knows. But outside the constraining box of methodological materialism, there’s no reason to call it implausible prima facie. 

Granted, it might offend an old-school Cartesian who holds to a particular interpretation of the Judeo-Christian imago Dei concept. But for my money, it’s probable. After all, we know from direct experience that we have minds. And we can infer that we and fungi share the same designer.

Reductive materialists try to define their problem away?

Sabine Hossenfelder, Taking on Consciousness, Tackles Panpsychism 

Denyse O'Leary

 Recently, I’ve been looking (here and here) at theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s argument that quantum mechanics does not show that consciousness is essential for understanding the universe. The topic has become very interesting because of the growth of panpsychism in science — which Hossenfelder references in the video.

Panpsychism is the belief that all of nature participates in some way in consciousness but that it is most highly developed in humans. Many prefer it to materialism because the panpsychist does not need to show that human consciousness is some kind of illusion that we evolved to believe in (?). It is part of the normal functioning of the universe even if we don’t understand how it works.

To see what’s at stake here, consider the concept of the “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Why is it a “hard problem”? It’s only that if we assume a universe that should not have consciousness but, unaccountably, does. 

Changing Our Assumptions 

Suppose we change our assumptions and assume that consciousness is a normal part of the universe that requires no special explanation in principle? The panpsychist can approach the question of human consciousness as a much more restricted one because the goal has changed: It is no longer to explain the existence of consciousness in principle, only how it comes to exist in a certain way in humans.

Anyway, in “Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Effects?” (November 19, 2022), Hossenfelder talks about some of the theories in this area:

For example, just a few months ago, David Chalmers and Kelvin MacQueen wrote a paper about this. They proposed to address the issues of the Wigner–von Neuman interpretation by using a particular mathematical model for consciousness, that is integrated information theory, IIT for short. We briefly talked about IIT in an earlier video. The basic idea is that each system is assigned a quantity, big Psi, that you can calculate from how well-connected the system is, and how it processes information. The bigger Psi, the more conscious the system. (8:11)

In this theory, consciousness it’s not binary, it’s not on or off, it’s gradual. This is why Christof Koch, one of the proponents of Integrated Information Theory, thinks it’s a panpsychist theory. Everything is a little bit conscious; it’s just that humans are a little bit more conscious than carrots. I want to apologize to all carrots who are watching. (8:36) 

But carrots aren’t watching. 

And That Is the Point 

Christof Koch of the Allen Institute is a proponent of the admittedly panpsychist Integrated Information Theory (IIT), originally developed by fellow neuroscientist Giulio Tonioni.

David Chalmers first coined the expression “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995. Chalmers and MacQueen’s paper is here: They write, “Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, but more complex versions remain compatible with empirical evidence. In principle, versions of the theory can be tested by experiments with quantum computers. The upshot is not that consciousness-collapse interpretations are clearly correct, but that there is a research program here worth exploring.”

Read the rest at Mind matters