Book: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?

Friend of mine turned me onto Frans de Waal's latest book.  The title says it all -- evaluating foreign intelligence requires the ability to jump outside your skin, and until very recently most scientists haven't had that ability.

Except in Darwin's time it was much more acceptable to talk about "The Expression of Emotion in Animals."  We lost our communion with animals about the time B.F.Skinner declared animals simple automatons.  It's taken fifty years to get it back.

Fascinating so far.

Skinner caught on to one or two things, but treating those insights as the be-all and end-all of psychology never seemed to me to be a sensible idea.

_Howard wrote:

I think that most animals are far more intelligent than they are given credit for. But I also don't believe that teaching animals to emulate human behavior is any indication of intelligence. The only way to observe the intelligence level of animals is by studying them in the wild. Perhaps "intelligence" is not even the correct word to apply to animal behavior.

This is turning out to be as good a summary of de Waal's book as any.

NoCoPilot wrote:

_Howard wrote:

I think that most animals are far more intelligent than they are given credit for. But I also don't believe that teaching animals to emulate human behavior is any indication of intelligence. The only way to observe the intelligence level of animals is by studying them in the wild. Perhaps "intelligence" is not even the correct word to apply to animal behavior.

This is turning out to be as good a summary of de Waal's book as any.

That's a good way to word what I think. I think we're trying to teach fish to climb trees and then declaring them stupid because they can't. Until we move out of that model I don't think we can evaluate how intelligent animals are.

Fish climbing trees! Good one, Jenni. Now I can't get the picture out of my head.

Our new cat finally discovered the vent below the cabinet in the kitchen. Cats love lying in the heat. It only took her a few days after that to connect the sound of the blower with the heat coming from the vent. When the furnace blower comes on, she will run upstairs and head straight for the vent. If the air conditioning is on and the blower comes on, she pays no attention to it. Maybe a slightly different sound because of the change in the air flow through the exchanger.

That type of behavior is what I would use to evaluate the intelligence of critters.