Avian race anything but birdbrains, scientists find

"We have to get rid of the idea that mammals -- and humans in particular -- are the pinnacle of evolution." Erich Jarvis, a Duke University neurobiologist


Cognitive behavior rivals even chimps, recent studies show

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Monday, February 7, 2005

Parrots can chat with humans, pigeons can tell a Picasso painting from a Monet and, in the Galapagos islands, Darwin's finches can spear insects with tools they make from cactus spines -- but, contrary to what scientists have long believed, none of them is acting merely on blind instinct or unconscious responses to training.

What those birds are doing, instead, is being smart -- displaying "complex cognitive behavior" as modern brain researchers call it. The new understanding comes from a recent series of experiments and comparative studies of the brain structures of birds, humans and other mammals.

So branding slow-witted people as "birdbrains" is merely ignoring reality, says a group of the world's leading neuroscientists who study the brain circuitry of birds, fish and mammals and who propose that it's high time to abandon old words to describe the brain and adopt a new and better account of brain evolution.

"Evolution has created more than one way to generate complex behavior -- the mammal way and the bird way, and they're comparable to one another," said Erich Jarvis, a Duke University neurobiologist. "In fact, some birds have evolved cognitive abilities that are far more complex than many mammals."

Jarvis heads an international consortium of scientists who have worked for more than seven years studying the brains of birds, fish and mammals. They have published a report on their conclusions in the February issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Take the striking example of a species of crows in the New Caledonian islands of the South Pacific that has been observed in the wild stripping twigs to make barbed, hooked tools for catching worms.

In experiments by Alex Weir and his colleagues at Oxford University, a captive New Caledonian crow named Betty was frustrated when she couldn't use a bit of straight wire -- which she'd never seen before the start of the experiment -- to snag food from a tiny bucket. Pausing for an instant after an unsuccessful try, she took the wire, bent it around the edge of the food tub, and then snagged the bucket handle with the hook she had fashioned herself.

(If you want the proof, a Quicktime movie of Betty in action is on the Web at: http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/.)

Chimpanzees poke sticks into termite mounds for dinner, but none has ever been known to make even a simple tool -- like straightening a bent piece of pipe in order to reach an apple through a hole -- without being carefully coached by humans, Weir said. The lowly crow shows far more advanced "cognitive behavior" than chimps, the closest genetic relatives of humans, according to Weir and Jarvis' colleagues.

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