Are You Smarter than a Chimpanzee?

Are You Smarter than a Chimpanzee? - Ben Ambridge ****

There's a whole lot of entertainment - but also surprising facts - to be discovered in Ben Ambridge's book Are You Smarter than a Chimpanzee?

Ambridge sets out to compare many human mental abilities with those of animals (and even insects), showing how often we share capabilities, and in some (rather limited) circumstances can even be beaten by animals, hence the title of the book. Ranging from the way that, for example, some animals aren't taken in by the optical illusions that fool us, to feats of memory and logic, page after page Ambridge presents us with fascinating examples from the natural world.

Sometimes what's most amazing is the lengths to which researchers (who can't ask the animals what they are thinking) have to go to devise their experiments to see, for example, how ants would deal with the Tower of Hanoi problem, or whether or not chickens are less likely than us to be fooled by optical illusions where one object (in a 2D image) is apparently in front of another. You will both be entertained by the capabilities of the star performers of the natural world and given the chance to try out many of the tests yourself (though some of the more tedious ones, involving coming back to the book after several months or filling in a questionnaire over several pages, will probably get a glance, rather than be done for real).

This book was a whisker away from five stars, and only two things held it back. One was the author's over-the-top enthusiasm for puns. Practically every page has one or more. After 20 pages I was groaning - by the end, I was whimpering. The other issue I have is that Ambridge is somewhat heavy handed in attempting to counter 'human exceptionalism' - the idea that humans are somehow special. While he makes perfectly reasonable points that we are animals, and one or more other species often has similar 'special' abilities, even Ambridge makes the point that we often have them to a far greater extent - and no other species even comes close in the range of these specialities. He also ignores our ability to consciously shape and change our environment by our creativity - rather than be shaped by it, identified by Bronowski as one of the more unique human characteristics. I think it's silly to try to pretend humans aren't exceptional just to avoid the long outdated idea that we are the pinnacle of 'creation'.

Despite this, I had huge fun with this book, and Ambridge certainly doesn't always bang on in anti-exceptional mode. I was interested in the animal examples, but even more so in the human shortcomings. All in all, this psychological comparison of humans with other species is a delight that should get many, many readers interested.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically? Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Search This Blog