In his enlightening and far-reaching new book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), primatologist Frans de Waal makes the case—with clarity, compassion, and wit—that animal cognition is not inferior to humans'. He claims that the human-animal difference is, as Charles Darwin wrote, "one of degree, not kind." Animals can use tools, plan ahead, and keep track of time. But, says de Waal, they only learn what they need to learn, which sometimes obscures their problem-solving abilities from human observers.
De Waal, a psychology professor at Emory University and the director of the school's Living Links Center, has plenty of choice anecdotes to relate, from apes that cooperate on elaborate food-gathering tasks to crows that seem to recognize human faces.
In Are We Smart Enough, he also provides a detailed but accessible history of the study of evolutionary cognition, rebutting the arguments of researchers who possess a more mechanistic view of animal behavior.
For de Waal, the key to understanding animal intelligence is empathy. He writes, "Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are."
This article appeared in the September/October 2016 edition with the headline "Animal Smarts."
Freelance writer Michael Berry has written about books and authors for various local and national publications, including the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Portland Press Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle.
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