Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals are?

Resumen del libro

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 preeminent species on Earth. But in recent decades, these claims have been eroded, or 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 photographic 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 the scope and the depth of animal intelligence, revealing how we have grossly underestimated their abilities. People often assume there is a cognitive ladder, from lower to higher forms, with human 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 judge your perception of your surroundings as more sophisticated than that of a echolocating bat? De Waal tells of the rise and fall of a view of animals as stimulus-reponse beings, and opens our eyes to their complex and intrricate minds.With astonishing stories of animal cognition, expert science and De Waal's deeply enquiring mind, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? challenges everything you thought you knew about animal-and human-intelligence.

Biografía del autor

Frans de Waal es un renombrado primatólogo y etólogo nacido en los Países Bajos en 1948. Es profesor del comportamiento de los primates en el departamento de psicología de la Universidad de Emory y director del Living Links Center, adscrito al Yerkes National Reserch Center de Atlanta. Es autor de títulos de enorme éxito, como El mono que llevamos dentro, La edad de la empatía o El bonobo y los diez mandamientos. Sus investigaciones se centran en el comportamiento social de los primates: la resolución de conflictos, la cooperación y el rechazo a la desigualdad. Frans de Waal es miembro de la Academia Americana de las Ciencias y de la Real Academia holandesa de las Artes y las Ciencias. En 2007 la revista Time lo incluyó en la lista de las cien personalidades más influyentes del planeta.