“A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently.”

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https://www.wired.com/story/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals/

Stephen Baxter’s SF novel “Evolution” does a very good job of portraying a velociraptor like dinosaur with hunter-gather tech and intelligence — doomed by inability to domesticate animals or cooperate. It was a small part of the novel but a fascinating bit of prescience.

“Rather than neat layers, birds have “unspecified balls of neurons without landmarks or distinctions” but the neural networks resemble ours. And resemble LLMs.