Fernando García-Moreno is an evolutionary and developmental neurobiologist. He says for a long time there’s been a debate about how amniote brains, like birds and mammals, evolved and what makes them similar. One brain structure, called the pallium [possibly responsible for speech and intelligence], has been seen as a comparable structure in birds, mammals, and reptiles.
Convergent evolution means that two features in two independent animals have evolved separately, but they have reached the same feature. It’s the same characteristics. So the classic example is the wings of bats, butterflies, and birds.
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The main takeaway is that humans are special, but so are birds and reptiles. So our brains are amazing, but bird brains are even as amazing, at least. We have neurons other species do not have. But the chicken, even the chicken, stupid chicken, they do have neurons that we don’t have. So evolution has found so many different ways to generate complex brain, not just only one direct pathway from amphibians to humans. In this case, the tree of intelligence is just a tree. It’s not just a single branch, in the case of mammals.
Related on the SLP
