Customer Reviews

Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works (Psychology)

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The book is exceptionally well written, and the research behind it is powerful and compelling. I first came across Povinelli's work in a special Scientific American issue on intelligence, where he debated his former mentor, Gordon Gallup, on the nature and extent of chimpanzee self awareness. I was wowed by the strength and elegence of his reasoning then, and again in his previous book, "What Young Chimpanzees Know About Seeing", perhaps all the more so because his conclusions run so completely counter to what I had been conditioned to think about chimps from depictions in popular culture.

This book is even better and more full of revelations than his previous work. I couldn't put it down. On top of that, it is an outstanding example of the rigorous application of scientific method, and could provide many terrific examples for teachers trying to teach the scientific method to students.

"Folk Physics for Apes" is probably the best scientific book I've read, beating out tough competition from "The Selfish Gene" and "The Extended Phenotype" (R. Dawkins), "The Dinosaur Heresies" (R. Bakker), as well as other top notch books on the nature of mind, like "An Anthropologist on Mars" (O. Sacks) and "The Rediscovery of the Mind" (J. Searle).

Simply the best!