Summary of Frans de Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Frans de Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition-in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos-to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we've underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal-and human-intelligence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638153610

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Analysis

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Frans de Waal’s

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Table of Contents

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Overview

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (2016) provides an overview of the history of animal cognition research and the most recent discoveries about animal intelligence. As researchers continue to improve methods for testing animals’ cognitive abilities, they are discovering that animals process, respond to, and act on stimuli in ways previously assumed to be exclusively human.

The study of animal intelligence began in the 1940s as ethology, a behavior-focused field of inquiry that does not consider the animal’s thought processes. Ethology researchers tended to assume all animals learned in the same way. In the 1950s, scientists discovered that some animals