Why are there so few smart mammals (but so many smart birds)?

Why are there so few smart mammals (but so many smart birds)?

The expensive brain hypothesis predicts an interspecific link between relative brain size and life-history pace. Indeed, animals with relatively large brains have reduced rates of growth and reproduction. However, they also have increased total lifespan. Here we show that the reduction in production with increasing brain size is not fully compensated by the increase in lifespan. Consequently, t...

Why are some animals so smart?

If so many are “few,” how few are “many”?

The scope of reference of a word's meaning can be highly variable. We present a novel paradigm to investigate the flexible interpretation of word meaning. We focus on quantifiers such as "many" or "few," a class of words that depends on number knowledge but can be interpreted in a flexible manner. Healthy young adults performed a truth value judgment task on pictorial arrays of varying amounts ...

Why are there so few fish in the sea?

The most dramatic gradient in global biodiversity is between marine and terrestrial environments. Terrestrial environments contain approximately 75-85% of all estimated species, but occupy only 30 per cent of the Earth's surface (and only approx. 1-10% by volume), whereas marine environments occupy a larger area and volume, but have a smaller fraction of Earth's estimated diversity. Many hypoth...

Why are there so many explanations for primate brain evolution?

The question as to why primates have evolved unusually large brains has received much attention, with many alternative proposals all supported by evidence. We review the main hypotheses, the assumptions they make and the evidence for and against them. Taking as our starting point the fact that every hypothesis has sound empirical evidence to support it, we argue that the hypotheses are best int...