Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

So, yes, we are smart enough to appreciate other species, but it has required the steady hammering of our thick skulls with hundreds of facts that were initially poo-pooed by science.

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

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge. While the term cognition refers to the process of doing this, intelligence refers more to the ability to do it successfully.

Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special.