Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

I look at human cognition as a variety of animal cognition.

anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think.

discoveries of mental life ripple across the animal kingdom, a process best summarized by what I’ll call my cognitive ripple rule: Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought.

We don’t actually need language in order to think.

Human empathy is a critically important capacity, one that holds entire societies together and connects us with those whom we love and care about. It is far more fundamental to survival, I’d say, than knowing what others know. But since it belongs to the large submerged part of the iceberg—traits that we share with all mammals—it doesn’t garner the same respect. Moreover, empathy sounds emotional, something cognitive science tends to look down upon. Never mind that knowing what others want or need, or how best to please or assist them, is likely the original perspective taking, the kind from which all other kinds derive.

the up-and-coming field of “embodied cognition,” which postulates that cognition reflects the body’s interactions with the world.

who knows how much of our own cognition is tied to the specifics of our bodies, such as our hands? Would we have evolved the same technical skills and intelligence without these supremely versatile appendages?

the wall between human and animal cognition has begun to resemble a Swiss Gruyère full of holes. Time after time we have demonstrated capacities in animals that were thought to set our species apart. Proponents of human uniqueness face the possibility that they have either grossly overestimated the complexity of what humans do or underestimated the capacities of other species. Neither possibility is a pleasant thought, because their deeper problem is evolutionary continuity. They can’t stand the notion of humans as modified apes. Like Alfred Russel Wallace, they feel that evolution must have skipped the human head. Although this view is currently on its way out in psychology, which under the sway of neuroscience is edging ever closer to the natural sciences, it is still prevalent in the humanities and most of the social sciences. Typical is a recent reaction by the American anthropologist Jonathan Marks to the overwhelming evidence that animals pick up habits from one another, hence show cultural variability: “Labeling ape behavior as ‘culture’ simply means you have to find another word for what humans do.”3