A parrot with a brain the size of a chestnut has the intelligence of a 4 year old human child.

A friend of mine has four birds:  two parrots and two cockatoos.  They may not be as intelligent as a four-year-old child, but they'll give the average pet dog a run for his money.  Very intelligent critters.

Well there were a few parrots in line at the bookstore last night. I think they were still miffed at not getting the cool contract that the owls got.

I'll tell you, if you want to meet members of the opposite sex and get a lot of attention in public, borrow someone's parrot or cockatoo and walk around.  Every time Donna and I go to outdoor venues and she brings the bird, we're surrounded by veritable crowds of people.

But don't adopt one for that purpose unless you're willing to make a commitment - they live for many decades.  Donna put it in her will.

I guess it was this study on the arithmetic Grey Parrot:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2005/07/27/ecfbird27.xml&sSheet=/connected/2005/07/27/ixconnrite.html

The 28-year-old can label more than 50 exemplars, including seven colours, five shapes, quantities to six and three categories (colour, shape, material), and use "no", "come here", "wanna go X" and "want Y" (X and Y are appropriate location or item labels).

Alex is able to combine labels to identify, request, comment upon or refuse more than 100 items. He processes queries to judge category, relative size, quantity, presence or absence of similarity or difference in attributes, and to show label comprehension.

....

He sounds very object-oriented. No, really, one theory of humans' object-oriented nature is that our ancestors' swinging in the jungle and using colors to find food, meant being able to distinguish with high precision where one particular object ended and another began. Not too different from a parrot.

Whales, I dare to imagine, think more in waves than in particles. (They don't count discrete plankton, they instead have a plankton field theory.)

> A parrot with a brain the size of a chestnut has the intelligence of a 4 year old human child.

Quite the refutation. Must be a member of the intelligent design community.

A more accurate statement would have been:

"Parrots have brains the size of a chestnut. Some individual examples of certain species of parrots have been tested to have similar cognitive conceptual understanding levels as that of certain 4 year old human children."

Not sure if it's really 4, I'd have thought more like 1 or 1.5. So we are comparing genius parrot against retarded child and just getting a general feel for their level of being able to reason abstractly.

Chances are bird's brains have a higher power to weight ratio.

Which would make those brains prone to failure due to lack of redundancy