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Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals

Complex neural circuits likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

In that case, both groups would have inherited the complex neural pathways that support cognition from a common ancestor: a lizardlike creature that lived 320 million years ago, when Earth’s continents were squished into one landmass. The conventional thinking started to change in the 1960s when Harvey Karten, a young neuroanatomist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mapped and compared brain circuits in mammals and pigeons, and later in owls, chickens and other birds. In a third study that used deep learning, Kempynck and his co-author Nikolai Hecker found that mice, chickens and humans share some stretches of DNA that influence the development of the neocortex or DVR, suggesting that similar genetic tools are at work in both types of animals.

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