By FRANS de WAAL: refuted (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 10, 2016, 13:14 (2934 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Another review of his book refuting his claims of animal intelligence:
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47452/title/Opinion--Assessing-Fr...

QUOTE: "This behavior of Alex reveals an essential flaw in all those attempts to stimulate animals to show behavior they don’t show of their own accord (and I’m sure de Waal would agree on this point): it is all chores. None of the apes that were trained to become lingual would ever initiate anything like a conversation.

Intelligence is not to be gauged by how far apes can adopt human language and culture! If a human expects an ape to behave like a human in order to show its intelligence, maybe the human is not as intelligent as he thinks he is. Perhaps the reviewer should initiate a conversation with Alex in Alex’s own language, and then maybe he’d have a different story to tell.

DAVID’s comment: I work with horses. The reviewer has it exactly. Animals are trained to respond exactly as you want them to. They are conscious, respond to command, and have no self-aware consciousness. Nothing like humans. We are not degrees of difference. We are different in kind.

I don’t know of any scientist who claims that our fellow animals have the same level of intelligence, let alone self-awareness as humans. Horses think like horses, apes think like apes, ants think like ants. But time after time, scientists demonstrate the intelligence of other organisms by setting them problems which can only be solved by intelligent thought – you have drawn our attention to many such tests. Yes, humans can train their fellow animals. That doesn’t mean that their fellow animals in the wild don’t have the intelligence to communicate with one another, cooperate with one another, devise ways of life that suit themselves, solve problems that nature throws at them, and in the context of animal societies create systems that work a darn sight better than our own.