- Hardcover: 219 pages
- Publisher: Diane Pub Co (March 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0756765552
- ISBN-13: 978-0756765552
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 386 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
What is your cat thinking when she scratches at the door? What goes through Koko the gorilla's mind when she signs? For that matter, what goes through our minds when we think about animals and intelligence? Science writer Stephen Budiansky explores the difficulties of comparing intelligence between species in If a Lion Could Talk and takes a strong stance against measuring other animals using human standards. (The title is part of a Wittgenstein quote that ends "...we would not understand him.")
The book shows how the most basic principle of evolution--that all living things are related--has been misconstrued by well-meaning scientists to imply that all animals possess intelligence that differs from ours only in quantity. This leads to comparisons of near-equivalence between such intuitively likely pairs as adult gorillas and human children, comparisons that Budiansky suggests are misleading and more descriptive of our own minds than those of our distant cousins. What evolution should be telling us, he says, is that each species is equally well suited to its niche and should be examined for what it is, not how similar or different it is from us. How is it that chimpanzees can perform such remarkable problem-solving without language?
If a Lion Could Talk will not make anyone lose interest in animal minds, for that is not its intention. If anything, it inspires a real sense of admiration for the billions of living things that make it through each day despite the seemingly terrible handicap of not being human. Budiansky tells us that if we want to learn about our planet-mates, we have a lot of unlearning to do. Luckily for us he is gracious enough to provide an introductory unlesson. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Although Budiansky concedes that animals most likely experience emotions, he denies them consciousness, which, in his view, is inseparably linked to language, an exclusively human invention. Furthermore, Budiansky contends, animals don't really suffer, at least not the way we do, because their sensation of pain lacks a social context. Budiansky, a science writer (The Nature of Horses) and U.S. News & World Report deputy editor, uses this debatable thesis to bash the animal rights and deep-ecology movements. Whatever one thinks of the correctness of his argument, it has value as a levelheaded critique of our tendency to anthropomorphize animal behavior. Using a neo-Darwinian perspective bolstered by animal cognition, neurophysiological and computer-simulation studies, Budiansky explains such processes as chimpanzees' and rats' mental map-making, wasps' "tool"-using skills and birds' songs as evolutionary adaptations for survival. What humans see as intentional, conscious behavior in other species (e.g., opossums playing dead) may be explicable in terms of simple associative learning, he contends. Still, the author concludes that recognizing other animals as unique beings should increase our respect for them as being "worthy in their own right," an outlook that provides common ground between this cautionary synthesis and a more expansive view of animals as exemplified in the work of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and others.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating, Challenging, and Counter-Intuitive,
By
This review is from: If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness. (Hardcover)
If you like having things you think you know challenged by a rigorous scientific thinker and expert debater, you'll like this book. You'll also learn a heck of a lot -- not only about animals and how they evolved, but about humans and how we evolved. As well as about how some of the advantages evolution has given us actually fog our thinking on issues such as animal intelligence.If you're not a rigorous scientific thinker, or can't stand to risk having a sacred cow gored (if I may use a term redolent of speciest violence against animals, or some such claptrap), don't bother reading this book. You'll only wind up giving it a one-star review and shrieking tediously about your violated sense of oneness with the Earth.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Misrepresents study findings,
By A Customer
This review is from: If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness. (Hardcover)
On page 108, Budiansky writes: "[Birds]can fly reliably in a preset compass direction...but many such birds have no mental map or spatial memory to go with this compass. If shifted laterally off course, they do not adjust their direction to keep heading toward their habitual wintering spot, but instead continue to fly on the same preset magnetic compass bearing--and they wind up displaced laterally from their destination."This does not represent the findings of the largest bird migration study ever conducted, that by Dutch biologist A.C. Perdeck. Over the course of several years, Perdeck captured 11,000 migrating starlings at their autumn stopover sites in Britain and France. He ringed them and transported them by aircraft to Switzerland, 375 miles to the SE, where they were released. Perdeck found that juvenile birds that had never migrated before continued to fly on their original directional heading and ended up in southern France or Spain. Adults who had migrated before, however, reoriented themselves and flew via different headings to their normal wintering grounds in England and northern France. Perdeck repeated the experiments with migrating chaffinches captured in Holland and released in Switzerland. Again, juvenile birds continued on with their original directional heading, SW, but adults reoriented and flew NW to their traditional wintering grounds in Britain. (In nature, the birds fly in mixed flocks of adults and juveniles.) Budiansky doesn't footnote his statement and in the chapter notes only cites the general popular reference work, "The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior," not even pointing to a specific article in this work. In other words, the source of the information for his statement is effectively obscured. I am sympathetic to Budiansky's point of view, but I am very, very disappointed in the way he has presented his arguments. In short, his book is not a reliable report of research findings on animal "intelligence."
5.0 out of 5 stars
Much better than its reviews would indicate!,
By A Customer
This review is from: If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness. (Hardcover)
It's very sad that a lot of readers who have reviewed this book have been unable to get past their beliefs to give this book an honest review. If you are an animal rights type, who believes that dogs are "fur people" or that chimps experience life the same as humans, this book is not for you. If you have a genuine curiosity for interesting research and theory, and aren't totally blinded by animal rights rhetoric, you will love this book!!
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