Frans de Waal

Primatologist Frans de Waal argues that our methods for measuring animal intelligence have systematically underestimated cognitive complexity in non-human species — because we designed tests for human cognition and then measured animals against human benchmarks rather than attending to their evolutionary context.

Frans de Waal uses the filmed farewell between a dying chimpanzee named Mama and a human friend she had known for decades to explore the science of animal emotions — arguing that the emotional lives of non-human animals are more complex, more varied, and more continuous with human emotional experience than most scientific orthodoxy acknowledges.