Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)

All it has done is make us measure animals by human standards, thus ignoring the immense variation in organisms’ Umwelten.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.

The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

just read this in Carl Sagan's biography

One cannot master set research tasks if one makes a single part the focus of interest. One must, rather, continuously dart from one part to another—in a way that appears extremely flighty and unscientific to some thinkers who place value on strictly logical sequences—and one’s knowledge of each of the parts must advance at the same pace.15

Even the 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!

We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.

half a century ago, DNA studies revealed that humans barely differ enough from bonobos and chimpanzees to deserve their own genus. It is only for historical reasons that taxonomists have let us keep the Homo genus all to ourselves.

The natural sciences try to come to grips with the whole iceberg, whereas the rest of academia is happy to stare at the tip.

And why do governments still spend billions of dollars to search for extraterrestrial civilizations while there is no shred of evidence to encourage this quest?

is the fact that life came about on earth not evidence for life elsewhere?

Dog owners who stare into their pet’s eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin—a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes full of empathy and trust, we enjoy a special relationship with the dog.

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We want a unitary theory that covers all the various cognitions found in nature. To create space for this project, I recommend placing a moratorium on human uniqueness claims. Given their miserable track record, it is time to rein them in for a few decades.

When the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated the existence of an insuppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes.

Brains are the most “expensive” organs around. They are true energy hogs, using twenty times more calories per unit than muscle tissue.

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Even within a species, the brain may change depending on how it is being used, such as the way song-related areas seasonally expand and contract in the songbird brain.2 Brains adapt to ecological requirements, as does cognition.

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But an assumption is still only an assumption. It doesn’t absolve us from working hard on the issues at hand, which is to determine at what cognitive level a given species operates and how this suits its ecology and lifestyle.

As a proponent myself, I do appreciate my more skeptical colleagues. They keep us on our toes and force us to design clever experiments to answer their questions. So long as progress is our shared goal, this is exactly how science ought to work.

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.

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Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.

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.