Are We Smart Enough To Know Animals

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Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? past Frans de Waal
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Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Quotes Showing 1-30 of 114

"Are nosotros open up-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we artistic 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 primal point is that anthropomorphism is not always every bit problematic every bit people recall. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity oftentimes hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, i uncomfortable with the notion of humans every bit animals. When nosotros are because species like the apes, which are aptly known as "anthropoids" (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape'due south osculation "mouth-to-mouth contact" so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would exist like assigning World's gravity a dissimilar 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 forrad, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are nonetheless facing the mindset that brute cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can't be truly deep and amazing. Toward the terminate of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on homo 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 total spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come up across as a colossal waste material of fourth dimension. What a bizarre brute nosotros 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?

"Just those stories inspire observations and experiments that do aid the states sort out what'south going on. The scientific discipline fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly in one case said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the 1 that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny."
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"There are many means to procedure, organize, and spread information, and information technology is merely recently that scientific discipline has get 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 Plenty to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"Werner Heisenberg put it, "what nosotros find is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding breakthrough mechanics, simply it holds every bit true for explorations of the animal"
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"At the time, scientific discipline had declared humans unique, since we were so much improve at identifying faces than whatever other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested generally on man faces rather than those of their own kind."
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Plenty to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"Canis familiaris owners who stare into their pet'due south eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin—a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes total of empathy and trust, we savor a special relationship with the dog.42"
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"They were by and large run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms nearly ordering everyone else effectually and stealing their comrades' girlfriends."
― Frans de Waal, Are Nosotros Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"At that place are lots of wonderful cerebral adaptations out in that location that we don't accept or demand. This is why ranking cognition on a unmarried dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive development is marked by many peaks of specialization. The environmental of each species is central. The"
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Plenty 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, particularly when it comes to species close to us. If other primates recollect 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 sensation have their work cut out for them to substantiate such a merits. It may, literally, be all in our heads. The"
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Plenty to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early on critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn by and large through marvel and free exploration, both of which are likely killed past a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it every bit a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to report complex beliefs."
― Frans de Waal, Are Nosotros Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"we are not the only ones who knew a Rock Age: our closest relatives nevertheless alive in one. To stress this point, a "percussive rock technology" site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years.31 These discoveries led to a human-ape lithic culture story"
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"Chimpanzees use between 15 and twenty-five different tools per community, and the precise tools vary with cultural and ecological circumstances. One savanna customs, for example, uses pointed sticks to hunt. This came as a shock, since hunting weapons were idea to be some other uniquely homo advance. The chimpanzees jab their "spears" into a tree cavity to impale a sleeping bush baby, a pocket-size primate that serves as a protein source for female apes unable to run downwards monkeys the way males do.23 It is also well known that chimpanzee communities in W Africa crack nuts with stones, a beliefs unheard of in East African communities. Man novices have trouble great the same tough nuts, partly because they do not have the same muscle force as an adult chimpanzee, but also because they lack the required coordination. Information technology takes years of practice to identify one of the hardest basics in the world on a level surface, find a adept-sized hammer rock, and hit the nut with the right speed while keeping i's fingers out of the style."
― Frans de Waal, Are Nosotros Smart Plenty to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stalk to await the smell of butyric acrid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments accept shown that this arachnid can become for 18 years without food, the tick has ample fourth dimension to run into a mammal, driblet onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and dice."
― Frans de Waal, Are Nosotros 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 private [...]. Females keep the aforementioned melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males arrange theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls inside a male person alliance sound alike. (p. 262)"
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"Ethology adult its own specialized language about instincts, fixed activeness patterns (a species' stereotypical behavior, such equally the domestic dog'southward tail wagging), innate releasers (stimuli that elicit specific behavior, such as the red dot on a gull's neb that triggers pecking by hungry chicks), displacement activities (seemingly irrelevant actions resulting from conflicting tendencies, such as scratching oneself before a decision), and so on. Without going into the details of its classical framework,"
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Plenty 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 chamber. She took it under her arm out onto"
― Frans de Waal, Are Nosotros Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"Homo reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our ain reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia'south findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes knowledge around, adapting it to the organism's needs."
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

"At that place are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don't have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a unmarried dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive development is marked by many peaks of specialization. The environmental of each species is primal."
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Plenty to Know How Smart Animals Are?

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