Figure 1a , "... a tree depicting the phylogeny of the cerebral cortex in placental mammals," seems to have been copied verbatim from a 2013 text which I can't read, but - why does it have a branch labeled "insectivores"? By 2013 it was known that insectivores were not a clade. Also, humans are great apes, and shouldn't be labeled as a separate branch.
@gay_ornithischians
Maybe these are minor issues not germane to the course of the paper's arguments, but it makes me feel like reading the rest of the paper isn't worth it.
@llewelly one of the arguments is that the parts of mammal brains are said to be sheet like while dinosaur ones are 3d. according to the paper this makes it so that emerging connections between bird brain parts would be longer which would result in latency. and the bigger the brain became the worse this problem would be
@gay_ornithischians
Latency affects how much time it takes for a correct solution to be found, but it doesn't affect what kinds of problems can be solved or the correctness of the answers. (Ironically, this is among the first things taught in indroductory computer sciences courses on algorithms, but nonetheless the computer industry has a fetish for speed, or at least the appearance thereof. )
@llewelly latency is what i called one of the issues described (because that is what it sounded like to me), but it may not be what the author was getting at
@gay_ornithischians sorry. I read as much of as I could stomach, but I guess that amounts to maybe half of the words. And I've already forgotten much of it. And since I'm not a neuroscientist, I am afraid I'll never really understand it. I admit this makes me a bad critic of the paper in question.
@llewelly ah no problem. i was just wondering if by the paper's logic the group of dinosaurs best positioned to evolve human intelligence (however unlikely it still was) would be ceratopsians. they already have a kind of neck that is ideal to carry large heads and the paper says that a nuclear pallium brain would have to be much bigger than a laminar one to match a human's
@gay_ornithischians
I'm now trying to think of some set of conditions that might push a ceratopsian to evolve a huge brain instead of (or in addition to) a huge set of frill and horns.
the endpoint that comes into my head is ceratopsians who dig ditches to irrigate crops, and the need to irrigrate crops is what requires the big brains, BUT how do they get there? I have no idea.
@llewelly perhaps if display court building (like a bowerbird's) appeared in the lineage it could be exapted into the beginning of agriculture later. suppose the males defend the same court each year and maybe even mark it with droppings that could fertilize the "treasures". the treasures could include seeds or parts of plants. then next year the female liked the display that included growing plants that took root. maybe even topiary like practices could emerge lel
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