Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

[anarresa]

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are
By Frans de Waal
3 stars

No. We weren’t in the past and may not be any better now.

de Waal falls into the academic trap of talking too much about history and personalities and politics in a book that should be accessible to the average reader. The average reader wants to know about the animal behavior experiments and anecdotes, and should know the difference between the two. Respect must be paid to the pioneers, and a sense of time and place for context of the different experiments, but de Waal goes on and on. I’m not quite sure how much data is available for different animals, but de Waal studies apes and most of the animal studies discussed are apes and monkeys and several with birds. That left me feeling like we were going over the same ground. People look at behavior as unintelligent, science does some studies, studies later found to be flawed, animal more intelligent than we thought, but people are still really smart. I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if there were different animals studied or for multiple experiments to be described with the conclusion summarized instead of repeated. Animal intelligence is an important topic. More broadly the average reader needs to be made aware of how important experimental design is to any results and how investigator bias can creep in at many stages of a study, not just for animal behavior but biology to economics. So I found the book dull but do want people to read it… I recommend people pick it up and skim it for the important bits.

[[deleted user]]

So sorry the book wasn't all that enjoyable to read, Anarresa. Maybe Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel would be closer to what you had in mind? I gave it four stars.