Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Frans de Waal is the head primate researcher at Emory National Primate Research Center, the world's most prestigious research institute (formerly known as Yerkes). He is famous for his work which is critical of attitudes of anthrocentrism or human-supremacism. In this work, he selects a number of commonly presented assertions about the uniqueness of humanity, and demonstrates the ways that such claims are almost always dramatically overstated, if not outright false. The work is less focused around explicitly answering the question of the title, and more a reasoned critique of human arrogance regarding the scientific method. De Waal presents example after example of famous research studies of the past which produced results that fundamentally shaped the way 19th and 20th century humans understood animals then shows the ways that such studies ultimately were debunked due to limitations in research design (almost always resulting from overconfidence in the human way, or lack of ability to leave the human perspective).

De Waal's book is an easy read for the non-scientifically literate public and helps give those of us outside of science a better understanding of what science can and sometimes cannot tell us. It is a very empathetic book, which encourages us to have more humility when we consider the untold billions of species whom we share the Earth with, who down to even the strangest species of wasp, may be capable of higher levels of cognition than we would have ever imagined otherwise.