Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

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Pub Date 25 Apr 2016 | Archive Date 30 Apr 2016

Description

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.

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...


Advance Praise

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? will completely change your perceptions of the abilities of animals. This book takes the reader on a fascinating journey of discovery into the world of animal problem-solving.” - Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human
“This is a remarkable book by a remarkable scientist. Drawing on a growing body of research including his own, de Waal shows that animals, from elephants and chimpanzees to the lowly invertebrates, are not only smarter than we thought, but also engaged in forms of thought we have only begun to understand.” - Edward O. Wilson, University Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? will completely change your perceptions of the abilities of animals. This book takes the reader on a fascinating journey of discovery into the...


Available Editions

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ISBN 9780393246186
PRICE $27.95 (USD)

Average rating from 30 members


Featured Reviews

Frans de Waal was already a Name when I was an undergrad Anthropology major, way back in the early 1980s—and he has lost none of his edge since. He answers his titular question engagingly, accessibly, but with true scientific rigor, calling for species-appropriate methodology while driving yet another rail spike in the already mouldering coffin of strict behaviorism.

One of many favorite quotes from the book, "All organs and processes are a great deal older than our species, having evolved over millions of years with a few modifications specific to each organism. Evolution always works like this. Why would cognition be any different?" [Ch. 5: The Measure of All Things]

Why, indeed?

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Excellent look at how often we underestimate the intelligence of animals. The author presents various studies that show the most incredibly smart things that animals do. Can we really understand animals if we only look at them from a behavior standpoint? What do these studies tell us about the animals who live in this world with us? I thoroughly enjoyed these anecdotes about various animals. This is one book that will make you think deeply about our relationship with the natural world and it's wild inhabitants. The well-written and easy-to-follow text would be appropriate for high school students and above.

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