By FRANS de WAAL on animal cognition (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 10, 2016, 14:09 (3148 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: From the NY Times. Great article from a great research scientist. I don't agree with his conclusions, but then neither do many of the comments. There is a great diagram of animal cognition:-http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/sunday/what-i-learned-from-tickling-apes.html...-Once again I can only thank you, not only for a superb article but also for your integrity in presenting an argument you disagree with. Needless to say, I am delighted to find an expert in the field confirming just about everything I believe concerning animal cognition and the direct link between our ancestors and ourselves. 
Here are a few more hammer blows to the “anthropodeniers”, with some “bolds” from me:
 
“Nowadays the term [anthropomorphism] has a broader meaning. It is typically used to censure the attribution of humanlike traits and experiences to other species. Animals don't have “sex,” but engage in breeding behavior. They don't have “friends,” but favorite affiliation partners.
Given how partial our species is to intellectual distinctions, we apply such linguistic castrations even more vigorously in the cognitive domain. By explaining the smartness of animals either as a product of instinct or simple learning, we have kept human cognition on its pedestal under the guise of being scientific.” -“Accusations of anthropomorphism are about as big a spoiler in cognitive science as suggestions of doping are of athletic success. The indiscriminate nature of these accusations has been detrimental to cognitive science, as it has kept us from developing a truly evolutionary view. In our haste to argue that animals are not people, we have forgotten that people are animals, too.””-“Now let us return to the accusation of anthropomorphism that we hear every time a new discovery comes along. This accusation works only because of the premise of human exceptionalism. Rooted in religion but also permeating large areas of science, this premise is out of line with modern evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Our brains share the same basic structure with other mammals — no different parts, the same old neurotransmitters.
Brains are in fact so similar across the board that we study fear in the rat's amygdala to treat human phobias. This doesn't mean that the planning by an orangutan is of the same order as me announcing an exam in class and my students preparing for it, but deep down there is continuity between both processes. This applies even more to emotional traits.”-All of this confirms Shapiro's magnificent summary of the arguments with which humans oppose the concept of animal cognition, all the way down to bacteria: “large organisms chauvinism”. Thank you again, David, for shining this light even into your own darkness!