No Man is an Island — Magpie Edition

Every heard of the Social Intelligence Hypothesis? Put simply, it sez. that the more social activity you engage in, the more intelligent you are (ok, not you, it’s your species. Whatever).

It’s not a particularly controversial idea, but it’s been kinda hard to actually prove, with numbers and stuff. Part of the reason being that society size isn’t exactly dispositive — i mean, Wildebeest are dumb, but lords, do they every have large societies.

Anyhow, Ashton et al., in a recent paper, have done stellar work in fleshing this out with real data in a recent paper in Nature. They studied magpies, and conclusively demonstrate that group size amongst magpies is associated with the cognitive abilities of the magpies (•). The larger the groups, the better they are at cognition. Yes, there were exceptions, but no more so than you would find in any normal distribution of intelligence (MIT graduates are not all brilliant )

Mind you, we need to be somewhat careful here — group size is but a crude indicator of social complexity (wildebeest again!), but the relationship with sociality and cognition seems to be firmly established by this work.

The open question, however, is, what type of intelligence is selected for by social intelligence? Does it select for “overall intelligence” (“I’m a generally smart person”)? Or for very specific intelligence involving social skills (“I’m good at tweeting”)? The jury is still out on this…

(•) Successful magpies received a mozzarella-cheese treat. Which, frankly, is something I’d also try to be successful for…