50 million domestic parrots worldwide — enough to find strong correlations in genome
Parrot owners may have partially pretrained most domestic parrots to take an IQ test. Vocabulary size is one crude metric readily available.
Tiny neurons could be quite numerous in a larger skull?
Obstacles:
Need lots of space
Very long lifespan — have to find homes for all your extra parrots
General neediness
1-4 years to reach sexual maturity
Only 1-3 eggs 3-6 times per year
Success likely would trigger backlash (moreso than octopi probably)
Overall it seems tractable and neglected. In an absurd success scenario, the genius parrots could probably get jobs, make human & parrot friends, and generally get by. I think we wouldn’t know what to do with hypothetical genius octopi except maybe set them free.
I am completely outside my domain of knowledge here. What am I missing?
[Question] Could we breed/engineer intelligent parrots?
Advantages:
Breathes air (unlike octopi)
Talks (unlike octopi)
No IVF surgeries required (unlike mammals)
Very long lifespan — time to learn more
Highly social — good for communication
50 million domestic parrots worldwide — enough to find strong correlations in genome
Parrot owners may have partially pretrained most domestic parrots to take an IQ test. Vocabulary size is one crude metric readily available.
Tiny neurons could be quite numerous in a larger skull?
Obstacles:
Need lots of space
Very long lifespan — have to find homes for all your extra parrots
General neediness
1-4 years to reach sexual maturity
Only 1-3 eggs 3-6 times per year
Success likely would trigger backlash (moreso than octopi probably)
Overall it seems tractable and neglected. In an absurd success scenario, the genius parrots could probably get jobs, make human & parrot friends, and generally get by. I think we wouldn’t know what to do with hypothetical genius octopi except maybe set them free.
I am completely outside my domain of knowledge here. What am I missing?