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Published online 15 August 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1039
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Sing me something smart
Brainy birds have the best tunes — and the most pulling power.
When shopping for a mate, female zebra finches might choose males with the sweetest song because singing ability advertises intellectual prowess.
Neeltje Boogert of McGill University in Montreal, found that the males who sang the most complex melodies were also quicker at solving a problem to find food.
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Interesting study. But I have some remarks /questions: Is 'intelligence' (as defined here quite simplistically by the trial criteria) really advantegous for the individual or the whole species? If this were the case, *AND* intelligent behaviour is inheritable (i.e. genetically determined), why have the finches not evolved to be more intelligent as they currently are? Obviously, they have not tapped their full potential as a species, as exemplified by the large differences in cognitive ability between different indiviuals... The fact that intelligent behaviour / cognitive ability is quite limited throughout the animal kingdom and has been for the last 300 million years seems to imply that it may not impart a significant evolutionary advantage, neither for an individual nor for the species as a whole.
The whole evolution of the animal kingdom reflects that intelligence actually impart significant advantages to the species. Take the case of the phylum Mollusca with octopusses and squids being quite more intelligent than snails. You can be sure that mammals today are a lot more intelligent than the very early reptiles that appeared 300 million years ago. Give them enough time, and I mean geological times, and intelligences and behaviors as complex as the hominids will appear in other group of animals as well.
Sorry, but I do not agree. First, we are unable to prove that animals (all? some?) living today are really smarter or show more complex behaviour than those that lived, for example, 200 million years ago. Why should reptiles be less intelligent than mammals - they are cold blooded, but slowness (in the colder climate of our time) does not equal being dumb. The neural architecture, from single cell to complex arrangements like a brain, is more or less identical throughout the animal kingdom (there is a lot of evolutionary distance between an intelligent[?] human and an intelligent octopus). So, evidently, the potential to develop something like the human brain has been there for a long, long time, but it happened only once (dolphin-lovers may forgive me here). Second, and even more important: can you say that the octopus is really more *successful* than his dumb relatives, the snails, which have been around for at least as long as the cephalopods?
Do rich guys have better come on lines? Maybe the ladies like the long winded one best because all the other ladies also do.