Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition―in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos―to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal―and human―intelligence.
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35mentions
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2016–2026years
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- Humans are /extremely/ visual compared to other animals: this tends to make us underestimate the intelligence of other animals (when we use visual intelligence as a proxy for general intelligence) and miss out on smart uses of other senses entirely. Rats are well-known for thwarting maze studies using things like fine sensitivity to slope, directional orientation using smell gradients across a room, or detecting the direction of researchers outside the maze based on micro-vibrations.
(Good book on the general topic of measuring animal intelligence: "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" by Frans de Waal)
- For anyone actually interested in the question of measuring animal intelligence, I recommend the book 'Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?' by frans de waal.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30231743-are-we-smart-en...
(And if you care about measuring artificial intelligence, you should definitely care about what we've learned from trying to measure animal intelligence...)
- Seems like someone needs to read more Frans de Waal “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?”
https://wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to-Know-How-S...
- Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, 2016)
- Why not give the benefit of the doubt to other animals? It feels like we're peeling back the layers of "animals are unintelligent automatons" to realize we are animals, too.
I recommend thethe books Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal, and Mind of a Raven by Bernt Heinrich, among others.
- A brief list, without the links to library aggregator worldcat.org in the interest of time:
An Immense World, by Ed Yong; grabbed my attention right away
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, by Frans de Waal; got here from dog training and Temple Grandin and animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell
How Far the Light Reaches, by Sabrina Imbler; looks fascinating
Feral, by George Monbiot; Iteland used to be a rainforest, and salmon used to choke the rivers out here in the Pacific Northwest
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