Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (review)

Darwin told us, over 150 years ago, that we came from the natural world; that in our family albums there are, not many pages back, furred and feathered and scaly faces; that we are in unbroken continuity with nonhumans.

These conclusions are supposed to be accepted by all educated people as unimpeachable scientific orthodoxy. And they are, up to a point. We are happy to accept that we got our bowels and our muscle metabolism from our nonhuman ancestors and even that the depolarizations in our brain neurons that let us love Shakespeare are caused by the same ion tides, surging through sodium and potassium gates, that let a rat home in on a piece of stale cheese. But try to say that we share with nonhumans the building blocks of our behavior and our cognition, as we share the building blocks of our biochemistry, and the biological establishment starts to get uneasy. It wants to assert a belief about the specialness of humans that is very akin to the theological belief of the monotheisms that it loudly despises. Anthropomorphism is an unforgivable, career-endangering sin. Even if some nonhumans can be said to be cognate, human cognition, the biological establishment nervously reassures itself, is immeasurably superior to that of nonhuman cognition. They are a terribly insecure lot, these biologists. They are worried that someone is going to tell them that they are not at the apex of the evolutionary tree (a metaphor to which they cling most pathetically). It is not enough for them to rejoice in their own wonderful minds: they seek confirmation of their own wonderfulness by corrosive, repercussive, and profoundly unscientific denigration of the minds of nonhumans.

Frans de Waal is their worst nightmare. He mercilessly and swashbucklingly catalogs the evidence for animal minds. They may be rather different minds from ours, but they are, as any Darwinian should expect, in recognizable continuity with ours. Our grandiose anthropocentricity, de Waal shows us, has colored and distorted our view of nonhumans. And sometimes the blindness to the evidence looks willfully Nelsonian. I wouldn't be surprised.

Humans are extraordinary. They may well be special. But one has to do far more strenuous zoological and philosophical work than has yet been done in order to assert intelligently that they are. De Waal's book makes the bare assertion unsustainable.