Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Very interesting and very clear. My only criticism is that the author tends to go into the stupidities of the "other side," who see animals as unfeeling and as life-like automata, at more length than they merit.

Fran de Waal, a primatologist and ethologist with a long distinguished career watching primates as well as other animals, has written a fascinating book highlighting the cognitive abilities of our near relatives in the animal kingdom. You will definitely come away from this book with a deep appreciation of the remarkable behaviors demonstrated by animals who for a long time have been denied having abilities thought to only be possessed by humans.
That's as far as I will go in praising the book because the author in my opinion spends too much time complaining about the nay sayers rather than just dismissing them and he especially vents his distain for behaviorism and its predominate proponent B.F. Skinner. It appears to me that he has not read Skinner but simply follows the unsubstantiated party line by using him as a whipping boy for all those who think that the behaviorist approach was unnatural and superficial. He mentions Skinner so frequently one thinks that he was more concerned with behaviorism than the purported subject of the book. Also I feel that it would be more effective if those in the field of primatology would start their comparisons of behavioral repertoires with the premise that we are members of the animal kingdom and we should not be trying to see if other animals can do what we do but rather if we can do the remarkable things that other animals can do. Are we are smart enough to know how smart animals are? Rather are we smart enough to place ourselves appropriately where we belong in the family of life.

A well-written volume by a famous primatologist. Seeks to show that we are not as superior to animals, mentally, as we like to believe. The idea is anything but original; the whole of Darwin's second best-known book, The Descent of Man, is devoted to explaining precisely this point. What de Waal and his illustrious predecessor seem to forget, though, is that, whereas they have written books about apes, no ape has ever written a book about them.

As the French say, vive la difference!

This book illustrates what should be common sense, and that is animals understand and know much more then we estimate. After reading this book I have a much greater appreciation of our fellow Earthlings a.k.a animals.

Frans de Waal has written a brilliant book about animal cognition, a subject that has finally gained the respect of a majority of scientists after decades of stubborn resistance.

Given the fact that we and chimps share 98.8% of the same DNA, it's surprising how long it took. But now we must reckon with the hard truth -- not that chimps are like us but that we are just another species of ape. Read this and it will give you a whole new perspective on human behavior.

Well written. Intriguing information about animal intelligence but equally fascinating for its presentation of how we learn or fail to learn about animals.

Anyone who enjoys nature writing or popular science will enjoy this book. And maybe come out a little wiser and less humancentric.

kind of academic showing the many transformations and arguments about the evolution of ethology and animals intelligence but I guess a necessary read if you want to understand how science and academy works in developing theories about animals and the way they think and act

Taking a gradualist rather than a saltationist evolutionary stance, ethologist Frans de Waal is firmly positioned in the camp that considers the animal / Homo sapiens dichotomy as a misguided or false view of the natural world. For decades a scholar of evolutionary cognition, he has followed in the tradition of those who veered away from the behaviorist school of animal studies. De Waal states "" . . . if there is one overall trend in our field, it is that the wall between human and animal cognition has begun to resemble a Swiss Gruyère full of holes."" He further clarifies: ""The most parsimonious assumption we can make about behavioral and cognitive similarities between related species is that they reflect shared mental processes. Continuity ought to be the default position for at least all mammals, and perhaps also birds and other vertebrates." A very rewarding and satisfying book for those interested in the continuous evolutionary flow of all animals.

I learned a lot about animal observations in this book, that is, what goes into that science. However, I was disappointed after a while because the author kept referencing the same animals. The book felt like a text book, albeit a good one.

W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, in exchange for an honest review.

This is a fascinating look at how scientists allow their own biases to get in the way of truly evaluating the cognitive abilities of animals. Too often, instead of designing a series of challenges geared toward the abilities of the test subjects, scientists are trying to force the animals to conform to human testing. Frans de Waal, a well respected biologist and primatologist, has written Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? to challenge the current thought and to disprove the theory that humans are smarter. As the author explains, an elephant knows how to use tools, but the trick is to give them the right one for success.

There are two major schools of thought, in regards to the study of animal behavior. Ethology is the biological study of animal behavior in a natural setting, so ethologists believe that you need to observe animals in their natural habitats. Behaviorists seek to study animals in a controlled setting, laying forth a set framework for the environment in which the animals find themselves. They believe in designing a set of tests in a lab - for example, putting a piece of cheese at the end of a maze and seeing how fast the rat can find it. The author contends that the cognitive behavior of animals must be studied with a true test of their abilities and not a lab experiment designed for failure.

Having read books and seen examples of the extraordinary abilities of animals, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? did not surprise me. It will, however, challenge many readers to change their way of thinking about the animal kingdom and I wholeheartedly recommend this book.