The possible evolution of intelligent birds | The Children between worlds

[Spaceception]

My question is simple: Can birds evolve to have softer, shorter beaks, and something of a mouth so they can talk or maybe sound similarly to rodents or apes?

The reason being, beaks wouldn't be much of an evolutionary advantage due to them inventing weapons, so they would also develop a wider language.

it just needs to be possible, with a brief explanation that I can use for my book.

 

Thanks

Edited August 11, 2016 by Spaceception

[pincushionman]

Some birds are already capable, with effort, to speak and understand words and very simple sentences. They rely on their tongues like ventriloquists do, since they have no lips. Parrots and crows are, of course, the most well-known examples. Crows and other large corvids are capable of simple tool use (as in, use found objects to help accomplish tasks).

So you don't necessarily need a whole lot more for your super-bird species than bigger brains (for more memory and thinking power), and a better means of manipulating objects. They're kind of on their way already.

Though, most of all, there needs to be an evolutionary advantage to communicating more complex information and have complex coordination as a group. Our own capability for language grew from such a need, and it advanced society, which drove more complex language…in a self-reinforcing cycle.

[Nuke]

birds have evolved a lot of weight saving mechanisms. hollow bones, simplified, non redundant organs, fibrous beaks which are strong and yet light and some of them have the best vision of any animals this side of sea level. however i think the weight of additional grey matter would limit their flight capabilities and so would not be considered a desirable trait for natural selection and simply not evolve. however if they evolved on a planet with significantly lower gravity, many of those traits might not need to exist at all. so you might see bird-like creatures with teeth and solid bones, possibly a head like a seal or a cat for optimal streamlining. such a critter would be much more robust than their earthly counterparts.

 

Edited August 11, 2016 by Nuke

[hms_warrior]

Maybe you should look up current research regards intelligent of birds (especially ravens). Things they do allready now:

-not only tool use but tool manufacture tool manufacture
-logical thinking and understanding of mechanical "laws" (like "if i roll this ball down that slope, it will hit the nut wich will than drop down onto the other slope and roll to the exit where i can pick it up and eat it"). understanding of physical laws

-There are birds that have a language including different words for different kind of situations (like enemy on the ground, enemy in the air, food source south/north/west/east), and they can form a wide variarity of sounds (there are birds which can basicly mimic ANY type of sound).

Honestly, give them something like a hand with a thump and in a 10.000 years they will have rockets and fly to the moon.

Edited August 11, 2016 by hms_warrior

[Scotius]

No, they won't. You need a certain amount of gray matter involved in problem solving to go from using simple sticks and stones to proper technological civilisation. Our cousins, cimpanzees and bonobos have brains in excess of 500 cm² and can use simple tools - yet majority of scientists still doesn't consider them sapient. Even biggest birds alive, ostriches have hilariously small brains compared to humanoids. 10 000 years will not be enough for evolution to grow brains large enough in any species of animals. Not to mention the lack of the ability to manipulate obiects with both precision and strenght necessary to make proper tools. Even a simple act of making a stone blade by hitting it with another stone or piece of hard bone would be beyond ability of any bird imaginable. You can have an intelligent bird culture, but it won't be any sort of advanced technological civilisation.

[Green Baron]

I take it it is a fantasy/fictional book ?

... cause evolution does not have a direction. Is has no goal like "we will have a language or a large brain". Evolution is the outcome of variation and selection. The "evolutionary advantage" is not a plan for the future but a momentary fitness, an advantage for an individual to have a slightly better chance than the competitors to bring its genes to the next generation, where the same rules apply.

Furthermore there is no single feature without the rest of the organism. A large brain needs nutrition and oxygen, manipulative hands need a body with the necessary mechanical components to control it. A forearm and an elbow is a complicated mechanism. The bird's arm is simpler than that of a land living vertebrate, humerus (upper arm), ulna/radius(lower arm) and hand are nearly equal in length, there is only one strong finger. That cannot hold on to anything but can fly. Disadvantage: it's unflexible and breaks easily. The birds breast is formed to anchor those tasty flight-muscles.

Take a look at a bird's skeleton and at a humans. You'll recognize the same basic program but different realizations. The human arm is much more flexible, more like that of a bear or a cat. It has five developed fingers (varies ;-)), the thumb is opposed, the forearm can rotate. That will never fly but can easily climb a tree or manipulate things.

Birds nutrition is connected to the lifestyle: seeds and berrys, insects, some bigger ones small animals. The beak is quite suitable for that and it's light weighted (hollow). The beak has many variations, it can be long and pointed to pick insects out of the bark or a strong one to tear apart small animals. Many functions in a simple light weight tool to bring nutrition to the alimentary canal :-) The beak can't be changed to change the intestines as well and that is not easy, even for a process like evolution.

A mammal mouth works different. Weight is not a problem and nutrition can be more diverse. So there are teeth and a strong jaw behind it to chew. The skull is massive compared to a birds skull to support the chewing muscles. And they have a long, winding and heavy canal that could be able to support a big brain.

So as a conclusion: No, a bird will not evolve into something with a mouth, hands and a brain. It's program doesn't permit. Counter-quetion: could an ape evolve into a bird ?

(of course not)

 

But in a fictional world many things can happen of course :-)

 

Edited August 11, 2016 by Green Baron

[magnemoe]

Birds are pretty smart and their brains are very efficient for their weight. However sapience while regaining flight would be hard as you would have to scale up the brain many times, this also increase energy use.
Something about seeing in 3d promotes brains, primates also have big brains. 
If you have complex behavior in animal packs it also promotes big brains, look like it was how we became intelligent. 
now if it was another planet a lower gravity and or higher air pressure would make it much easier to combine flight and intelligence.
As green baron points out, getting from wings to hands would be hard, probably harder than the rest, again for aliens having 6 limbs should make this easier especially if the arms are designed for climbing, 

[VaPaL]

Some larger birds can have a brain large enough and fly, they already carry another dead animal with thme, take all that payload mass and make a brain and 'brain support' systems. They won't be able to fly with their prey, but it's a give and take. There's no need to have a mouth, some birds (as stated above) can already replicate almost every sound. There's no need for hands either, they don't have to use tools that are similar to ours, they can make tools to be used by their feets, for htat, they would have to be able to suport their body with their wings (not that hard) so thay would have both feed free and evolve a more 'useful' feet. Nothing keeps them for creating tools that would be (somehow) used by wings.

We have the tendency to create creatures that have similar traits with us, so they can fit in our world (most si-fi aliens are humanoids) but truth is that it's more likely that another species would have a complete set of tools and tech, that we probably wouldn't be able to use. It's hard to imagine, but again, we find easier to create things suitable for us to use. Of course there is still need to have something that can grab and manipulate (the tool won't magically stick and work by its on) but it could be other thing than a hand.

[hms_warrior]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

As green baron points out, getting from wings to hands would be hard

True but...use wings as legs (less complicated construction -> easier evolutionary path), use legs as hands (they allready have a oposable digit) Of course flying would suffer from that, but if we have to give up/restrict flying to gliding anyway because of brainmass than this is less of a problem.

[Green Baron]

 

47 minutes ago, hms_warrior said:

True but...use wings as legs (less complicated construction -> easier evolutionary path), use legs as hands (they allready have a oposable digit) Of course flying would suffer from that, but if we have to give up/restrict flying to gliding anyway because of brainmass than this is less of a problem.

He, that's a bat, a flying mammal, with fur, a mouth and teeth ... :-) That'll be a nice idea for @Spaceception, huge flying bats in low gravity.  Flying was "invented" more than once.

 

Beak, mouth and digestion:

The beak-thing anabled a feature in birds: some of them can eat and digest carrion, partly decomposed organic matter. For mammals that's absolutely toxic, some can to a certain degree but i know of no mammal that relies on that (nope, Hyenas hunt).

 

Edited August 11, 2016 by Green Baron

[Scotius]

2 hours ago, hms_warrior said:

True but...use wings as legs (less complicated construction -> easier evolutionary path), use legs as hands (they allready have a oposable digit) Of course flying would suffer from that, but if we have to give up/restrict flying to gliding anyway because of brainmass than this is less of a problem.

You want your manipulators close to the brain and eyes - to have shortest possible reaction time for hand-eye coordination and to have good look at the obiect handled. Of course use of legs to manipulate the environment is absolutely possible. Many amputees had to learn this trick after losing both arms - but by no means it is optimal solution. And wings -> legs is not an easier evolutionary path. Actually it is complicated and ineffective, because wings are already highly specialised limbs. This hypothetical "bird" species would have to simultaneously evolve its legs into hands and wings into legs - how is that "simple"?

[wumpus]

Do they have to use human speech?  Obviously not a problem for parrots, but no idea how far parrots can evolve.  If simply to "communicate with each other", then you probably need some sort of runaway sexual selection among songbirds.  This isn't a bad explanation for the evolution of human brains, but it isn't clear that a powerful brain will aid the species in ways that a powerful brain pushed genus homo past other great apes.  Perhaps a society that included both such birds and humans will have "bilingual" members of both species.

[Findthepin1]

Have them not have evolved beaks in the first place. 

[Scotius]

Then it wouldn't be birds anymore. Just another evolutionary offshot of the dinosaurs.

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, Scotius said:

Then it wouldn't be birds anymore. Just another evolutionary offshot of the dinosaurs.

Its aliens, it would not be related to birds anyway. 
I just understood that this was an alien world, for one an denser atmosphere than earth 1.5 bar would be enough, 2 bar and a lower gravity too and it get real easy as it it will be dragons. 
You could go for mouths if you want but that would kill some of the bird look and parrots have no problems with speaking, but weight limits on birds would be far higher, 
I liked the wing walking idea or go for 6 limbs, another idea is that early birds and bats has claws on the wings could you have hands? or numbers of toes and fingers is random because how the fins of an early fish was. 
So with 7 or more it should leave enough fingers, having something more than just an claw would be nice for an heavier bird in dense forest. 

[kerbiloid]

Mostly, they would lack lips to pronounce "p", "b", etc.
But if you try to speak keeping lips open, this sounds strange but enough understandable.

Also, a big brain would make their head heavy → body heavy and disbalanced. So, they would be penguins and use Linux.

[Scotius]

It's not entirely about the number of appendages. Theoretically you just need an equivalent of opposable thumb and a surface it can work against. I know a man that lost three fingers in an industrial accident - he does well enough with his thumb and pinky finger (relatively speaking of course). No, range of motions the arm have is very important too. Look at human arm - our range of motion is quite high at shoulder, elbow and the wrist. Structure of a wing is quite different - it's capable of strong and fast motions, but only in some directions. In other it has to be stiff or else it would not be capable of producing lift.

[wumpus]

10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Mostly, they would lack lips to pronounce "p", "b", etc.
But if you try to speak keeping lips open, this sounds strange but enough understandable.

Also, a big brain would make their head heavy → body heavy and disbalanced. So, they would be penguins and use Linux.

Would they evolve into Kerbals?

[Tex_NL]

12 hours ago, magnemoe said:

...
You could go for mouths if you want but that would kill some of the bird look and parrots have no problems with speaking, but weight limits on birds would be far higher,
...

A two or three part articulated upper beak would maintain the look and still pretty much keep all benefits. At the same time it would drastically improve the range of expressions and the ability of even more complex sound.

[kerbiloid]

18 hours ago, wumpus said:

Would they evolve into Kerbals?

Only those of them who use KDE. Gnome apprentices would become Gerbals.