Feeding 9 Billion: Innovations in Agricultural Modeling
By means of the mirror and mark test that is often used with human children and apes the authors show that Magpies take their mirror image for a reflection of their own body. These findings represent the first evidence of mirror self-recognition in a non-mammalian species and bear several major implications.
The phylogenetic lines of birds and mammals have gone through a separate evolutionary history for at least 300 million years. Up to now mirror-self recognition had only been shown in very few mammalian species like chimpanzees, orang-utans, elephants, and dolphins. Evidence for self-recognition in Magpies, therefore, provides particularly strong support that higher cognitive skills and consciousness developed independently in different evolutionary lines.
It has always been assumed that the neocortex is a prerequisite for higher cognition and consciousness. But birds have no neocortex and are endowed with a vastly different brain organization. Thus, the recent findings in Magpies show that even self-recognition is possible without a neocortex.
