Frans de Waal · 353 pages
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“Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial. So,”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“In other words, what is salient to us—such as our own facial features—may not be salient to other species.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Dog owners who stare into their pet’s eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin—a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes full of empathy and trust, we enjoy a special relationship with the dog.42”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“While language is helpful to communicate memories, it is hardly what produces them. My preference would be to turn the burden of proof around, especially when it comes to species close to us. If other primates recall events with equal precision as humans do, the most economic assumption is that they do so in the same way. Those who insist that human memory rests on unique levels of awareness have their work cut out for them to substantiate such a claim. It may, literally, be all in our heads. The”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Ethology developed its own specialized language about instincts, fixed action patterns (a species’ stereotypical behavior, such as the dog’s tail wagging), innate releasers (stimuli that elicit specific behavior, such as the red dot on a gull’s bill that triggers pecking by hungry chicks), displacement activities (seemingly irrelevant actions resulting from conflicting tendencies, such as scratching oneself before a decision), and so on. Without going into the details of its classical framework,”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“They were generally run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms about ordering everyone else around and stealing their comrades’ girlfriends.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“status competition and the opportunistic making and breaking of alliances that marks political strife. For this, we have to go to the males, also in the elephant. For”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Sultan would first jump or throw things at the banana or drag humans by the hand toward it in the hope that they’d help him out, or at least be willing to serve as a footstool.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Jolted by a twentyfold increase in testosterone, a bull changes into a sort of spinach-eating Popeye, a self-confident jerk ready to fight anyone in his path.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“we are not the only ones who knew a Stone Age: our closest relatives still live in one. To stress this point, a “percussive stone technology” site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory Coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years.31 These discoveries led to a human-ape lithic culture story”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“what else is cognition but information processing? Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for eighteen years without food, the tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“en route to such trees and get up before dawn, something they normally hate to do.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Small Gods
“At dawn, they call in a napalm airplane, but it drop the shit damn near right on top of us. Our own fellers be all signed and burnt up - come running out into the open, eyes big as biscuits, everybody cussing and sweating and scared, woods set on fire, damn near put the rain out!”
― Winston Groom, quote from Forrest Gump
“Maybe there isn’t such a thing as fate. Maybe it’s just the opportunities we’re given, and what we do with them. I’m beginning to think that maybe great, epic romances don’t just happen. We have to make them ourselves.”
― Marissa Meyer, quote from Cress
“Though I was having a blissful moment of being happy and content, I had one of those stray ideas you get at odd moments. I thought,How nice it would be if Eric were here with me in the car. He'd look so good with the wind blowing his hair, and he'd enjoy the moment . Well, yeah, before he burned to a crisp.
But I realized I'd thought of Eric because it was the kind of day you wanted to share with the person you cared about, the person whose company you enjoyed the most. And that would be Eric as he'd been while he was cursed by a witch: the Eric who hadn't been hardened by centuries of vampire politics, the Eric who had no contempt for humans and their affairs, the Eric who was not in charge of many financial enterprises and responsible for the lives and incomes of quite a few humans and vampires. In other words, Eric as he would never be again.”
― Charlaine Harris, quote from Definitely Dead
“Read it if you like or don't read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with string only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and then sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something-a scrap of paper-something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone can't be is because it never can become was because it can't ever die or perish...”
― William Faulkner, quote from Absalom, Absalom!
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