The ostrich has the lowest brain-to-bodymass ratio of any living bird. An ostrich eye is actually larger than an ostrich brain, and less than a third of their (very small) cranial real estate houses brain.
And yet, no ostrich has ever written an opinion piece about how Claude is conscious and has a soul.
Koalas' brain cases are only about 40% full of brain, the rest is fluid and fatty tissue. Their brains themselves are completely smooth, lacking most of the cortical structure normally associated with higher cognitive functions in mammals. A crocodile's brain is more highly structured than a koala's, and there are lizards that outperform them in problem solving and learning ability. They understand context so poorly that they don't recognize an eucalyptus leaf as food if it's been plucked from the branch.
But no koala has ever claimed that filling static floating-point numbers into a high-dimensional matrix is just like how a human child learns.
Oct 10, 2026, 9:08 AM@datarama You might wonder "how did the koala get so stupid??? Isn't evolution about survival of the fittest??" and yeah but in this context "fittest" means "most fit for its ecological niche" not "smartest/strongest/whatever".
Intelligence costs energy and eucalyptus doesn't provide energy but it is abundant. (I think there are a couple of other niche advantages of eucalyptus but can't quite remember what they are, probably that it's not really used by other animals or something). Evolution's "solution" (insofar as any of this is goal directed, which it isn't) is to reduce the energy consumption of their brains to the bare minimum... so the smooth brain and lack of higher cognitive structure is actually an evolutionary adaptation. The side benefit, of course, is not naming your fake robot girlfriend "Claudia".
Humans, meanwhile, with their fully-wrinkled brains, have invented multiple kinds of tech that threaten to wipe out most life on Earth, including themselves.
@brib niche advantage of eucalyptus: always perfect breath
Oct 10, 2026, 9:49 AMOct 10, 2026, 10:19 AMOct 10, 2026, 10:37 AM@brib The main advantage of eucalyptus is that it's poisonous. The oil is lethal to most animals even in small amounts.
Oct 10, 2026, 9:12 AM@datarama heh, I got "koala" as my nickname in university. Lately I'm more into capybaras, but a critter that sleeps seems so much more intelligent than us.
To make it fair, maybe you should have included in the list animals that hurt severely their peers, if there are any...
Oct 10, 2026, 11:34 AM@coder @dl2jml I think humans have mastered some specific kinds of self-destructive shortsighted stupidity that no other animal on the planet can aspire to.
Komodo dragons sometimes cannibalize their young. But I'm pretty sure that no komodo dragon has ever thought it was a good idea to build a nuclear stockpile. And no komodo dragon has ever asked ChatGPT to write its blog.
@coder I included programmers, didn't I?
Oct 10, 2026, 2:07 AM
@datarama are you unwilling to .. https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/116828988229900343
Oct 10, 2026, 3:25 AM@datarama @octothorpe hey, Siri, describe an ostrich to me (and it does pretty well)
@datarama I have no idea if any of what you said is correct but those birds are fucking weird.
@datarama
Much food for thought, right there. Would it get upset if I called it ‘birdbrain’? 🤗🙏🏻
@Su_G Probably not!
Though the ostrich is an extreme outlier among birds. Generally, bird intelligence is in the same range as that of mammals, and some birds (corvids and parrots) are on the level of primates.
