Published on August 2, 2023 7:32 AM GMT

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 donation of knowledge here. What am I missing?

Discuss