are we smart enough to know how smart animals are by frans de waal

I've also been cautious and have argued against claims such as dogs are smarter than cats or dogs are smarter than mice or crows are smarter than sparrows. I've always been leery of scaling intelligence across species, including, for example, claims that chimpanzees behave like young children in certain types of experiments.

Leavens, Bard, and Hopkins conclude in their detailed comparative analyses. This statement is a fair and general summary of what Drs.

' Direct comparisons of humans with apes suffer from pervasive lapses in argumentation.'

Hence, there is no evidence that the communicative signaling of humans, great apes or other animals, is predicated on substantially different cognitive bases. On logical grounds, the existence of hypothetical, causal mental states cannot be confirmed, with present technology. Tables 1 and 2 document the same sort of wishful thinking (systematic bias) in the face of the numerous confounds listed there. Thus, to claim a “species difference” in social cognition between apes and humans, at our present state of knowledge, is to promulgate the same kinds of prejudices that hereditarians evinced in the early history of biometric approaches to the study of intelligence-all group differences were taken to be evidence for innate, primary differences in abilities between different groups of humans, and environmental influences on mental development were routinely ignored (Gould 1981). Thus, where differences have been reported between ape and human groups, the relevant factors accounting for these differences (environmental, genetic) remain unknown. Moreover, every such claim of a “species difference” has been refuted by superior methodological approaches, involving within-species explorations of specific competencies (see notes to Table 1). Despite numerous claims to the contrary, no current scientific methodology has isolated evolutionary history as the causal factor in alleged ape–human differences in social cognition. On both methodological and logical grounds, the mental causality model of psychological processes has failed to produce any unambiguous ape–human differences in social cognition.

Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are by frans de waal