Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0393246183
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A New York Times Bestseller
From world-renowned biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal, a groundbreaking work on animal intelligence destined to become a classic.
What separates your mind from an animal’s? Maybe you think it’s your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future―all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet’s preeminent species. But in recent decades, these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Take the way octopuses use coconut shells as tools; elephants that classify humans by age, gender, and language; or Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. He offers a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long.
People often assume a cognitive ladder, from lower to higher forms, with our own intelligence at the top. But what if it is more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms that are often incomparable to ours? Would you presume yourself dumber than a squirrel because you’re less adept at recalling the locations of hundreds of buried acorns? Or would you judge your perception of your surroundings as more sophisticated than that of a echolocating bat? De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal―and human―intelligence.
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There is even a joke about its complete reliance on external cues, in which one behaviorist asks another after lovemaking: “That was great for you. How was it for me?” In the nineteenth century, it was perfectly acceptable to talk about the mental and emotional lives of animals. Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions. But while Darwin was a careful scientist who double-checked his sources and conducted observations of
language so well, I could say to him: “Kanzi, we’re not making the bunny, put Sue’s face together.” As soon as he heard this, he stopped making the bunny, and stuck to the pieces of my face. So, the instructions had an immediate effect.30 Since Kanzi lived for years in Atlanta, I met him multiple times and was always impressed by how well he grasped spoken English. What struck me was not his self-produced utterances—which were rather basic, certainly below the level of a three-year-old child—but
centers. His goals are rather modest at this point, such as to show that similar cognitive processes in humans and dogs engage similar brain areas. Greg is finding that the prospect of food activates the caudate nucleus in the canine brain in the same way that it does in the brain of businessmen anticipating a monetary bonus.39 That all mammalian brains operate in essentially the same way has also been found in other domains. Behind these similarities is a much deeper message, of course. Instead
disappear in the blink of an eye. That humans cannot keep up with this young ape has upset some psychologists. The distress Ayumu’s photographic memory caused in the scientific community was of the same order as when, half a century ago, DNA studies revealed that humans barely differ enough from bonobos and chimpanzees to deserve their own genus. It is only for historical reasons that taxonomists have let us keep the Homo genus all to ourselves. The DNA comparison caused hand-wringing in
exactly why metacognition, too, was deemed unique to our species. Animal research in this area began perhaps with the uncertainty response noticed by Tolman in the 1920s. His rats seemed to hesitate before a difficult task as reflected in their “lookings or runnings back and forth.”36 This was most remarkable, since at the time animals were thought to simply respond to stimuli. Absent an inner life, why be in turmoil about a decision? Decades later the American psychologist David Smith gave a