Clever as a Fox: Animal Intelligence and what it Can Teach Us about OurselvesHarvard University Press, 2002 - 228 Seiten Dogs are smarter than cats, dolphins and chimps are more clever than both, and we who determine the rankings top the scale--or so we think. But are we thinking clearly? To appreciate the mental abilities of the owl and the pussycat, the tortoise and the hare, requires a commitment to unraveling the nature of intelligence--a tricky and controversial proposition that Sonja Yoerg sets out to explore in this learned, lucid, and entertaining book about our complicated, often erroneous notions about animal intelligence. With forays into evolutionary biology, behavioral science, and comparative psychology, Clever as a Fox reveals the promise and pitfalls inherent in any attempt to assess animal intelligence. Along with the concepts we deploy to define and compare intelligence, Yoerg looks at the expectations and prejudices that cloud our judgment of the animal mind, perceptions shaped as much by Aesop and Disney as by direct observation of our fellow creatures. And because such perceptions are inextricably linked with judgments of value--ideas about animal mentality have much to do with which species end up on our laps and which on our plates--this deeply revealing look at how we think about animal intelligence should help us use our own intelligence more wisely. |
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Ergebnisse 1-3 von 44
... social knowledge is different in kind from other knowledge , and therefore whether special cognitive equipment is necessary to handle it . If any animal that needs to keep track of social information can employ the same mechanisms that ...
... social life ; social complexity might have spurred the development of other cognitive mechanisms , or embellished the operation of existing ones . Highly social primates might , for example , have perfected the art of translating ...
... social life that requires a sharp mind ; we can see that brain size increases with social complexity in primates , but we can't yet pin down experimentally what those more social primates are doing with that extra neural tissue . Until ...
Inhalt
A Dim and Clouded Eye | 1 |
The Interspecies Cognitive Olympics | 16 |
Angels to Insects | 34 |
Urheberrecht | |
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Clever as a Fox: Animal Intelligence and what it Can Teach Us about Ourselves Sonja Ingrid Yoerg Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2002 |
Clever as a Fox: What Animal Intelligence Can Teach Us About Ourselves Sonja Yoerg Keine Leseprobe verfügbar - 2001 |