Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

I enjoyed the book, although I was looking for something a little more Zee Frank, with more interesting anecdotes. Apparently, the fact that wasps can recognize faces just isn’t cool enough for me. The book’s central push is to challenge the assumptions we make about intelligence. We often assume that intelligence has to look like “human intelligence.” This would have been quite controversial fifty years ago, but it seems to be almost common knowledge now. My biggest complaint about this book is that it picks an interesting subject—animal intelligence, or intelligence in general—yet fails to say much meaningful about it. There is a common trope throughout history where someone will say something like “play is what makes humans different from animals,” only for science to eventually realize that animals play too, and therefore “play” isn’t the thing that makes humans different from animals. [a: Frans de Waal|112082|Frans de Waal|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222704792p2/112082.jpg] dismantles many more of these potential differences between humans and animals to drive home the point that humans aren’t different from animals—which seems both right and wrong to me. Of course, when looking at the evolutionary tree, there isn’t a special branch from which humans came. But this then makes the question around the success of humans even more interesting. If animals engage in all the behaviors that were thought to be exclusive to the human domain, why haven’t they dominated the environment in a way remotely similar to humans?