Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, by Frans De Waal

Various anecdotes/opinions about animal intelligence. Pleasant!

Overall thesis is that animals are intelligent but within their own contexts/environments/evolutions, and human attempts to test animal intelligence have usually been rife with anthropocentric silliness, and that's why scientists sometimes "found" that animals are unintelligent. Also, for a long time animal studies were biased by the behaviorist pre-conception that animals couldn't be intelligent, that they were just stimulus-response machines.

It's hard not to wonder if it's the humans who aren't so intelligent after all, eheheheheheheh?

de Waal is a famous primatologist, and I found this book after going to a lecture he gave in Brooklyn, where he seemed smart and interesting enough that I wanted to read more of him. But I will mainly remember that lecture for giving me one of my all-time-peak Brooklyn experiences, to wit:

interviewer "female bonobos are highly promiscuous, aren't they?"

FdW: "yes – essentially, male bonobos will not attack a baby of a female bonobo they've slept with in the past month. You see, the bonobos don't actually understand paternity, they don't know which kids are theirs, but if they've slept with a female recently then they won't attack her babies. The females respond by sleeping with basically every adult male in the tribe every month. So to answer your question, yes, female bonobos have an extraordinary amount of non-procreative sex."

Audience: immediately bursts into cheers, shouts of "yes queens!!!"

Either they missed the point of that story, or I did.

Here are various anecdotes from the book, all good. "They" or other anonymous people generally means either Bad Previous Researchers or the Bad Previous Research Consensus:

• Lol they tested animals on face recognition from human faces, rather than animal faces, because (ahem) "human faces have so much variation." Then they decided the animals weren't intelligent because they couldn't recognise different humans. It's hard to believe this shit is real! Turns out, you get different results when you test animals on recognising the members of their own species, who (to them) look just as varied and individuals as humans do to humans, who could have guessed.....
• Lol2, they ran an experiment that (long story short) gave completely fake results because the experimenters didn't know cats bash their heads at things as a kind of greeting/show of affection. How?!?!? It's just wild: if you've ever lived with a cat you would know this, how do they study cats and not know even the basics about cat behaviour? (Many such cases, alas...)
• They keep animals permanently starved to study food motivation, e.g. various tests where the reward is food. But FdW says a) would you do this to university students? Obviously not, and b) how well would you perform on a test when you were starving? Tons of animal research is basically broken
• Japanese primatologists introduced names and lifetime tracking for primates. At first they were mocked for e.g. thinking they could recognise 100+ different monkeys by face, but now this is standard. Amazing what you can do when you actually try!
• FdW doesn't believe in human language surveys either – I appreciated this. He thinks that most survey research gets false results
• FdW's argument for why he doesn't believe people think in words: If you thought in words, why would you ever have that “can’t put words to it” feeling?
• Sometimes when we think the animal understands a whole sentence, they might just be reading body language + recognising key words. FdW has some cool examples where it seemed like an animal understood a full sentence perfectly, but they may rather have just understood a key word like "water" and the emotional tone of the speaker (e.g. "angry") and figured out what to do – de Waal thinks that e.g. chimps have better emotional/bodylanguage/etc intelligence than humans do, since a lot of their life is spent on "social politics" and status hierarchies, so they are probably reading more into the researchers' bodylanguage than the researchers might realise.
• Overall, I think FdW is very good about the limits of his evidence, realises a lot of seemingly-intelligent actions could be explained by coincidence + cherry picking + experimenters seeing what they want to see – he believes that animals are more inteligent than they've been given credit for, but he isn't going to fudge or overstate the evidence to prove it, and I appreciate that.
• We have a thing we call “Theory of mind”, but actually what we do is physically follow people's gaze etc to understand what they want. In some sense it's theory of body, not mind.
• On chimp vs children intelligence tests: When we test kids, the experimenter is nice to them. When we test chimps, often the experimenter is deliberately "distant" and "scientific." At some labs the chimps are tested while under high anxiety eg from nearby banging from other chimps. Not to mention that we’re all more interested in our own species. No wonder the chimps are “shown” to perform worse than children!
• Lol they did a dog-wolf comparison where the dogs followed human pointing more than wolves did, and therefore claimed that dogs were more intelligent than wolves. But the dogs grew up with humans! And why should wolves follow our pointing anyway? Turns out, if you train a wolf from a young age, she will also learn human pointing. Overall, it's wild how bad the experimental setups for a lot of animal experiments seem to be.
• Dogs have hijacked the human parental pathways of eye contact
• FdW cares a lot about embodiment, reminds me of David Chapman. Chimps need to see an actual body, preferably chimp, operate a box in order to operate it – seeing a "magic box" that mechanically performs the same actions doesn't do it
• Elephants have 3x as many neurons as we do! And it’s not just because they're bigger – animal size generally maps to brain weight, but not to neuron count. Number of neurons does generally map to intelligence. So maybe elephants are much more intelligent than we are, we just aren't intelligent enough to know it!
• A thing I keep wondering, as FdW describes experiments where various animals are tricked with fake/distorted calls, etc: if you keep doing weird things to animals, like fake calls and distorted ones, how do you change their inner life? I feel like at some point if you're experimenting so much on a single animal or tribe, you've basically changed the objective conditions of their world – suddenly various previously-impossible things are now possible. At some point are you ruining your experiments by experimenting too much?
• Monkeys conform with their friends on eg fruit opening techniques, even when two techniques are equally good. This is lovely – it's a sign of Animal Culture