Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: 9780393353662: de Waal, Frans: Books
"Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" by Frans de Waal explores the complex world of animal cognition, challenging traditional views on the intellectual capabilities of non-human species. The book delves into various scientific fields, offering a comprehensive look at ethology's history and current state—the study of animal behavior.
Initially, de Waal introduces the subfield of animal cognition, emphasizing its interdisciplinary nature and drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. He highlights the historical reluctance of scientists to attribute "cognition" to animals due to human-centric biases.
De Waal criticizes extreme anthropomorphism and its opposite—anthropogenic, the denial of shared traits between humans and animals. He advocates for a balanced view where animal intelligence is recognized but contextualized within evolutionary continuities and adaptations.
Five Key Ideas with Quotes
Anthropomorphism vs. Anthropodenial:
De Waal argues that while anthropomorphism can lead to biased interpretations, completely denying similarities between humans and animals (anthropogenic) is equally problematic. He suggests a balanced approach to studying animal behavior.
Quote: "In all this, we love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone."
Continuity in Evolution:
The book stresses the evolutionary continuity among species, suggesting that many cognitive abilities are not unique but rather variations on a theme that has been modified over time.
Quote: "The comparison is not between humans and animals but between one animal species—ours—and a vast array of others."
Specialized Cognition:
Animals develop cognitive abilities finely tuned to their specific environmental and ecological needs, which De Waal calls the "magic well" of behaviors and skills.
Quote: "Each animal species seems to have a 'magic well'—an area of specialized behavior that keeps giving new insights the longer you look."
Misinterpretation of Animal Abilities:
The book discusses how misconceptions about animal cognition often arise from inappropriate testing methods or misunderstanding animal motivations and capabilities.
Quote: "Much of what underlies various kinds of cognition is retained from common ancestors, but each animal species has specialized cognition to help them survive in their particular circumstances."
Ethology and Human Exceptionalism:
De Waal criticizes the field of ethology for its past focus on human exceptionalism and argues for a more inclusive understanding of cognition that recognizes the impressive abilities of numerous species.
Quote: "Lots of animals are 'exceptional' in particular flavors of cognition—including humans, whose magic well is speech and symbolic thought."
Ten Key Quotes
"In all this, we love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone."
"The comparison is not between humans and animals but between one animal species—ours—and a vast array of others."
"Each animal species seems to have a 'magic well'—an area of specialized behavior that keeps giving new insights the longer you look."
"Much of what underlies various kinds of cognition is retained from common ancestors, but each animal species has specialized cognition to help them survive in their particular circumstances."
"Lots of animals are 'exceptional' in particular flavors of cognition—including humans, whose magic well is speech and symbolic thought."
"We're not comparing two separate categories of intelligence, therefore, but rather are considering variation within a single one."
"The twin pillars of modern animal cognition study are both evolutionary: fundamental continuity and adaptation to niches."
"De Waal argues that both anthropomorphization and 'anthropodenial' have led to missed opportunities for observation, experiment, and study."
"He doesn't claim that there isn't evidence for other animals doing very well with bits and pieces of language."
"The fields that have longest held onto the very old human/animal dichotomy, with the accompanying belief that 'evolution stops at the neck', are those concerned with humans and the furthest away from biology: the humanities."
Exploration of Cognitive Skills Across Species
De Waal meticulously documents instances where various species demonstrate cognitive abilities that challenge the once-held belief that these capabilities are unique to humans. For example:
Elephants have shown the ability to use tools and exhibit behaviors that suggest mourning their dead.
Cephalopods, like octopuses, display problem-solving skills and short-term and long-term memory despite having a radically different brain structure from mammals.
Birds, particularly corvids like crows and ravens, use tools and plan for future needs, a trait once thought to be exclusively human.
These examples highlight the book's core argument: cognitive skills have evolved multiple times across different lineages in forms that are often unique to specific ecological niches.
The Impact of Research Methodologies
De Waal criticizes traditional research methodologies for often being anthropocentric, designed around human ways of thinking and processing the world. This bias can lead to underestimating animal intelligence. He advocates for designing experiments that consider animals' natural behaviors and environments, which can reveal more about their true cognitive abilities.
Ethical Implications
The understanding that animals possess complex cognitive and emotional capacities has profound ethical implications. De Waal discusses how this recognition should influence our treatment of animals in research settings and zoos, farms, and homes. Recognizing animal intelligence challenges us to rethink animal rights and welfare issues.
The Continuum of Cognition
De Waal emphasizes that human intelligence is not a pinnacle of evolution but part of a continuum. This perspective challenges the anthropocentric view that places humans at the top of a hierarchical intelligence structure. Instead, de Waal suggests that each species has adapted cognitively in diverse ways to meet the demands of their environment, resulting in a rich tapestry of intelligence across the animal kingdom.
The Role of Culture in Animal Cognition
The book also touches on the role of culture in shaping cognitive abilities, illustrating that some learned behaviors are passed down through generations, contributing to a form of cultural evolution in non-human species. This is seen in primates, cetaceans, and birds, among others, where individuals learn from each other, leading to regional dialects in bird songs or specific hunting techniques in orcas.
Direct and Re-Phrased Quotes:
1. “Humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.”
2. “Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.”
3. “The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special.”
4. “There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.”
5. “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”
6. “Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal”
7. “Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.”
8. “At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.”
9. “[Dolphins] produce signature whistles, which are high-pitched sounds with a modulation that is unique for each individual [...]. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike.
10. “Entrenched disbelief is oddly immune to evidence.”
11. “While language is helpful to communicate memories, it is hardly what produces them. My preference would be to turn the burden of proof around, especially when it comes to species close to us. If other primates recall events with equal precision as humans do, the most economic assumption is that they do so in the same way. Those who insist that human memory rests on unique levels of awareness have their work cut out for them to substantiate such a claim. It may, literally, be all in our heads.”
12. “We are so logic-driven that we can't stand the absence of it.”
13. “Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.”
14. “We are not the only ones who knew a Stone Age: our closest relatives still live in one. To stress this point, a “percussive stone technology” site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory Coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years. These discoveries led to a human-ape lithic culture story.”
15. “While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust.”
16. “Chimpanzees use between fifteen and twenty-five different tools per community, and the precise tools vary with cultural and ecological circumstances. One savanna community, for example, uses pointed sticks to hunt. This came as a shock, since hunting weapons were thought to be another uniquely human advance. The chimpanzees jab their “spears” into a tree cavity to kill a sleeping bush baby, a small primate that serves as a protein source for female apes unable to run down monkeys the way males do. It is also well known that chimpanzee communities in West Africa crack nuts with stones, a behavior unheard of in East African communities. Human novices have trouble cracking the same tough nuts, partly because they do not have the same muscle strength as an adult chimpanzee, but also because they lack the required coordination. It takes years of practice to place one of the hardest nuts in the world on a level surface, find a good-sized hammer stone, and hit the nut with the right speed while keeping one’s fingers out of the way.”
17. “Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia’s findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism’s needs.”
18. “Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.”
19. “At the workshop, he presented his view on consciousness: that it has to be part and parcel of all cognitive processes, including those of animals. My own position is slightly different in that I prefer not to make any firm statements about something as poorly defined as consciousness. No one seems to know what it is. But for the same reason, I hasten to add, I’d never deny it to any species. For all I know, a frog may be conscious. Griffin took a more positive stance, saying that since intentional, intelligent actions are observable in many animals, and since in our own species they go together with awareness, it is reasonable to assume similar mental states in other species.”
20. “Animals learn what they need to learn and have specialized ways of sifting through the massive information around them. They actively seek, collect, and store information.”
21. “The idea of conformism among animals is increasingly supported for social behavior as well. One study tested both children and chimpanzees on generosity. The goal was to see if they were prepared to do a member of their own species a favor at no cost to themselves. They indeed did so, and their willingness increased if they themselves had received generosity from others—any others, not just their testing partner. Is kind behavior contagious? Love begets love, we say, or as the investigators put it more dryly, primates tend to adopt the most commonly perceived responses in the population.”
22. “Traditionally, animals are depicted as slaves of their emotions. It all goes back to the dichotomy of animals as "wild" and humans as "civilized". Being wild implies being undisciplined, crazy even, without holding back. Being civilized, in contrast, refers to exercising the well-mannered restraint that humans are capable of under favorable circumstances. This dichotomy lurks behind almost every debate about what makes us human, so much so that when humans behave badly, we call them "animals".”
23. “There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species’ cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.”
24. “True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. In doing so, I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination.”
25. “Although we cannot directly measure consciousness, other species show evidence of having precisely those capacities traditionally viewed as its indicators. To maintain that they possess these capacities in the absence of consciousness introduces an unnecessary dichotomy. It suggests that they do what we do but in fundamentally different ways. From an evolutionary standpoint, this sounds illogical. And logic is one of those other capacities we pride ourselves on.”
26. “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin”
27. “This is not to deny that humans are special—in some ways we evidently are—but if this becomes the a priori assumption for every cognitive capacity under the sun, we are leaving the realm of science and entering that of belief. ”
28. “Neuroscience may one day resolve how planning takes place. The first hints are coming from the hippocampus, which has long been known to be vital both for memory and for future orientation. The devastating effects of Alzheimer’s typically begin with degeneration of this part of the brain. As with all major brain areas, however, the human hippocampus is far from unique. Rats have a similar structure, which has been intensely studied. After a maze task, these rodents keep replaying their experiences in this brain region, either during sleep or sitting still while awake. Using brain waves to detect what kind of maze paths the rats are rehearsing in their heads, scientists found that more is going on than a consolidation of past experiences.”
29. “Aristotle’s scala naturae, which runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom.”
30. “In the same way that humans have a “handy” intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a “trunky” one.”
31. “Ironically, the study of animal cognition not only raises the esteem in which we hold other species, but also teaches us not to overestimate our own mental complexity.”
32. “[T]he term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness's sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.”
33. “They would herd the large whale into shallow waters close to a whaling vessel, allowing the whalers to harpoon the harassed leviathan. Once the whale was killed, the orcas would be given one day to consume their preferred delicacy—its tongue and lips—after which the whalers would collect their prize. Here too humans gave names to their preferred orca partners and recognized the tit-for-tat that is the foundation of all cooperation, human as well as animal.”
34. “The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be “Did we overlook something?” And the second should be “Did our test fit the species?”
Conclusion
Frans de Waal's "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" is a poignant critique of historical and current perspectives on animal cognition. Through compelling evidence and an engaging narrative, de Waal invites readers to reconsider the intellectual lives of non-human animals. He argues effectively for a paradigm shift from viewing animal intelligence through a lens of human exceptionalism to one of evolutionary continuity and ecological specialization. This book not only broadens the reader’s understanding of animal cognition but also enriches our appreciation of the complexity and diversity of intelligence across species.