Problems with comparative analyses of avian brain size

Abstract

There are multiple hypotheses for the evolution of cognition. The most prominent hypotheses are the Social Intelligence Hypothesis (SIH) and the Ecological Intelligence Hypothesis (EIH), which are often pitted against one another. These hypotheses tend to be tested using broad-scale comparative studies of brain size, where brain size is used as a proxy of cognitive ability, and various social and/or ecological variables are included as predictors. Here, we test how methodologically robust such analyses are. First, we investigate variation in brain and body size measurements across >1000 species of bird. We demonstrate that there is substantial variation in brain and body size estimates across datasets, indicating that conclusions drawn from comparative brain size models are likely to differ depending on the source of the data. Following this, we subset our data to the Corvides infraorder and interrogate how modelling decisions impact results. We show that model results change substantially depending on variable inclusion, source and classification. Indeed, we could have drawn multiple contradictory conclusions about the principal drivers of brain size evolution. These results reflect recent concerns that current methods in comparative brain size studies are not robust. We add our voices to a growing community of researchers suggesting that we move on from using such methods to investigate cognitive evolution. We suggest that a more fruitful way forward is to instead use direct measures of cognitive performance to interrogate why variation in cognition arises within species and between closely related taxa.