Minds I've Met: From Denying to Embracing the Inner Lives of Animals

Summary

New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal traces the dramatic changes in humanity’s perception of animals over the past half century.

How humans think about animals—and our place among them—has undergone a seismic change. For decades, scientists veered into what renowned primatologist Frans de Waal coined “anthropodenial”: a deliberate blindness to the characteristics that humans and animals share, which refused to compare our behavior to that of other species. But today, we know better—from the complex cognition of elephants to the highly coordinated hunting strategy of killer whales, scientists openly discuss animals as intentional agents, with goals, aspirations, relationships, and even plans.

Breaking old scientific taboos and never shying away from controversial topics, de Waal was at the forefront of this revolution, fighting against claims of human exceptionalism. Minds I’ve Met follows this radical shift in how science perceives the animal kingdom, from de Waal’s early studies in the Netherlands through his professional career in the United States. Along the way, he reveals fascinating aspects of animal insight, including how an ape thinks to solve problems it has never encountered, how rats form mental maps of each new place they visit, and how a jackdaw can remember and track objects even after they appear lost. Drawing from sixty years of the leading observations, ideas, and breakthroughs in fields ranging from ethology to evolutionary cognition, de Waal shows how humans have come to witness the emotions, thoughts, and consciousness that animals possess.

A tribute to the ingenuity of animals and the long arc of human understanding, Minds I’ve Met traces the complete turnaround in one of the fiercest scientific debates of our time. De Waal’s final published work brings humans ever closer to the rest of the animal world, and animals closer to ourselves.