The Thinking Animal (What Other Intelligence Reveals About Our Own)

A lively and illuminating look at how evolution shapes animal intelligence from the author of The Social Instinct.

In The Thinking Animal, Nichola Raihani examines the different aspects of animal behavior from an evolutionary lens, to see how, and why, animals succeed in some cognitive tasks and fail at others. We learn that ants navigate their environment by counting their steps, literally, while butterflies stay on course during their migration using innate mechanisms that track the sun’s position in the sky and sense the Earth’s magnetic field. Raihani relates how the chickadee can remember up to 80,000 different food cache locations, a startling accomplishment for an animal whose brain is the size of a pea. In a chapter, “Fake News,” Raihani writes about deceptive practices of different animals, including cuckoos, who lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, duping the parents into raising their offspring. The fairy wren has evolved a way to stop this: the wren's chicks hatch before the cuckoos. So the parents teach their offspring a special “password” encoded in a lullaby so they can differentiate their own young from the cuckoo's chicks.

In nimble, entertaining prose that draws on a variety of scientific studies as well as her own personal research, Raihani will reveal fascinating aspects of animal minds and behavior, while also delving into our own. By understanding the limits of animal intelligence, we learn something fundamental about the nature of evolution, and our own capacity to adapt and change.