#8 in Nature & environment
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
- 352
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 0 weeks on the list
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Our view
“Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” is an expert tour of the science of animal minds. Frans de Waal draws on research with chimpanzees, crows, octopuses and elephants to show how little remains of our claims to be the cleverest species. Some readers find the material repetitive and loosely structured; others come away with a broader idea of what intelligence is. It suits readers curious about animal cognition.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
What separates your mind from the mind of an animal? 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 pre-eminent species on Earth. But in recent decades, claims of human superiority have been eroded by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Take the way octopuses use coconut shells as tools, or how elephants can classify humans by age, gender, and language. Take Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who demonstrates his species' exceptional photographic memory. Based on research on a range of animals, including crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and, of course, chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal explores the scope and depth of animal intelligence, revealing how we have grossly underestimated non-human brains. He overturns the view of animals as stimulus-response beings and opens our eyes to their complex and intricate minds. With astonishing stories of animal cognition, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? challenges everything you thought you knew about animal - and human - intelligence.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.9 across 62 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 30% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Nature & environment average of 8.1. That is how 8.1 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.3 | 8 | 13% |
| Hardcover | 7.9 | 54 | 87% |
Frequently asked
How long is Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are??
It has 352 pages — longer than 50% of the ranked books in Nature & environment.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
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Same shelf — Nature & environment — with scores between 7.8 and 8.7, closest to this book.
