reading wednesday has a cold, and an overdue library book

I finished one book recently:

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waals. This is an overview of animal cognition--both the subject and some history of the field, by someone who has made it his life's work. A key point here is that animals other than humans--and especially other than primates--have different problems to solve, and different tools with which to do it. For example, humans, chimpanzees, and some kinds of wasps can recognize/distinguish other members of their own species; kittiwakes, a kind of seabird that don't care for their young, don't have or need it.

de Waal points out that sometimes animals look stupid because they evolved to solve different problems than we did, and sometimes it's because scientists have used the wrong tests. So, researchers thought humans can recognize chimpanzees and chimps couldn't, because chimps didn't distinguish *human* faces; meanwhile, most of us can't tell one chimp from another.

Another recurring theme is the moving line of "this is the very important thing that humans can do and animals, sometimes by redefining things like "culture" or "tool use" to exclude what non-human animals have been observed/proven to do.

The author also wonders what "how smart is an octopus?" even means, and how/if we can approach the question in animals with decemtralized nervous systems and no parental care or other social interactions with other members.

This was a fun read, mostly narrative and much of it about the author's own research, focusing on chimpanzees and corvids.