Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Quotes

“humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. 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.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“In other words, what is salient to us—such as our own facial features—may not be salient to other species.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial. So,”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Dog owners who stare into their pet’s eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin—a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes full of empathy and trust, we enjoy a special relationship with the dog.42”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“[Dolphins] produce signature whistles, which are high-pitched sounds with a modulation that is unique for each individual [...]. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike. (p. 262)”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Chimpanzees use between fifteen and twenty-five different tools per community, and the precise tools vary with cultural and ecological circumstances. One savanna community, for example, uses pointed sticks to hunt. This came as a shock, since hunting weapons were thought to be another uniquely human advance. The chimpanzees jab their “spears” into a tree cavity to kill a sleeping bush baby, a small primate that serves as a protein source for female apes unable to run down monkeys the way males do.23 It is also well known that chimpanzee communities in West Africa crack nuts with stones, a behavior unheard of in East African communities. Human novices have trouble cracking the same tough nuts, partly because they do not have the same muscle strength as an adult chimpanzee, but also because they lack the required coordination. It takes years of practice to place one of the hardest nuts in the world on a level surface, find a good-sized hammer stone, and hit the nut with the right speed while keeping one’s fingers out of the way.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“We are so logic-driven that we can't stand the absence of it.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“entrenched disbelief is oddly immune to evidence.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“While language is helpful to communicate memories, it is hardly what produces them. My preference would be to turn the burden of proof around, especially when it comes to species close to us. If other primates recall events with equal precision as humans do, the most economic assumption is that they do so in the same way. Those who insist that human memory rests on unique levels of awareness have their work cut out for them to substantiate such a claim. It may, literally, be all in our heads. The”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“They were generally run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms about ordering everyone else around and stealing their comrades’ girlfriends.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“One early November morning, while the days were getting colder, I noticed that Franje, a female chimpanzee, was gathering all the straw from her bedroom. She took it under her arm out onto”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?

“What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“The initial animosity between divergent approaches can be overcome if we realize that each has something to offer that the other lacks. We may weave them together into a new whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Ironically, the study of animal cognition not only raises the esteem in which we hold other species, but also teaches us not to overestimate our own mental complexity. We”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?