Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

This is not to deny that humans are special—in some ways we evidently are—but if this becomes the a priori assumption for every cognitive capacity under the sun, we are leaving the realm of science and entering that of belief. Being a biologist who teaches in a psychology department, I am used to the different ways disciplines approach this issue. In biology, neuroscience, and the medical sciences, continuity is the default assumption. It couldn’t be otherwise, because why would anyone study fear in the rat amygdala in order to treat human phobias if not for the premise that all mammalian brains are similar? Continuity across life-forms is taken for granted in these disciplines, and however important humans may be, they are a mere speck of dust in the larger picture of nature. Increasingly, psychology is moving in the same direction, but in other social sciences and the humanities discontinuity remains the typical assumption. I am reminded of this every time I address these audiences. After a lecture that inevitably (even if I don’t always mention humans) reveals similarities between us and the other Hominoids, the question invariably arises: “But what then does it mean to be human?” The but opening is telling as it sweeps all the similarities aside in order to get to the all-important question of what sets us apart. I usually answer with the iceberg metaphor, according to which there is a vast mass of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral similarities between us and our pr...