Book Club Event on 10/02/2021 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

[Eugene]

Event is on October 2nd, 2021. 4pm EST.
Follow Meetup link to online event: https://www.meetup.com/Inquiry-Non-Fi...

Pages to read: 241
ISBN: 9780393353662 (Originally listed edition)
ISBN: 9780393246193 (Edition I am Using)

While reading the book, consider the below questions:
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book?
•What is the different between the animal’s ecology, and its umwelt?
•What is cognition?
•How should tests be done on animals?
•What do scientist need to have before testing on animals?
•Do animals have social lives?
•Do animals engage in politics?
•Do animals have language?
•What are the differences between the behaviorism and ethology schools of thought?
•What and how do animals learn?
•How fair are the tests on animals against humans?
•What role does human ego play in the science of animal cognition?
•What is the difference between anthropomorphism and anthropodenial?

Your questions are important and will take priority. If you have questions about the book's content or related ideas, either let me know what your questions are or raise them during the discussion.

My Review of the Book:
https://inquiryformanantilibrary.blog...

Upcoming event:
https://www.meetup.com/Inquiry-Non-Fi...

If you would like to help support this group and help cover the costs of running it, you can donate via Zelle, PayPal, or Venmo. You can send money to eugenefrominquiry@gmail.com. This is not a requirement. Just an option. If you feel that you get a lot out of the events, this allows you to support the group (and me primarily) financially. It will be much appreciated.

(If my official name is need, let me know and I will let you know what it is.)

Summary from Goodreads:
What separates your mind from an animal’s? Maybe you think it’s your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future—all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet’s preeminent species. But in recent decades, these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Take the way octopuses use coconut shells as tools; elephants that classify humans by age, gender, and language; or Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. He offers a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long.

People often assume a cognitive ladder, from lower to higher forms, with our own intelligence at the top. But what if it is more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms that are often incomparable to ours? Would you presume yourself dumber than a squirrel because you’re less adept at recalling the locations of hundreds of buried acorns? Or would you judge your perception of your surroundings as more sophisticated than that of a echolocating bat? De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal—and human—intelligence.