Quotes About Species

We seek ecological validity in our studies and follow the advice of Uexküll, Lorenz, and Imanishi, who encouraged human empathy as a way to understand other species. True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are.

Not unlike Lorenz's emphasis on knowing the whole animal, Imanishi urged us to empathize with the species under study. We need to get under its skin, he said, or as we would nowadays put it, try to enter its Umwelt.

La comunicación permite a los miembros de una especie reunirse y coordinar sus vidas tanto en un sentido positivo, por ejemplo, en las tareas cooperativas de las abejas o de las jaurías de perros salvajes, como en un sentido negativo, por ejemplo, cuando un ruiseñor macho canta a pleno pulmón para mantener a los rivales fuera de su territorio.

ethology's focus was on behavior that develops naturally in all members of a given species.

Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom.

What is the largest land mammal doing with three times as many neurons as our own species?

In fact, it has been proposed that absolute neuron count, regardless of brain or body size, best predicts a species' mental powers.61

This suggests that for our species, too, the cerebellum is critically important.63

Ironically, the study of animal cognition not only raises the esteem in which we hold other species, but also teaches us not to overestimate our own mental complexity. We

True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are.

Diego, a giant tortoise, single-handedly saved his species from extinction. As one of the few surviving representatives of his kind, he was moved from an American zoo to a breeding program on the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador. Diego's unrelenting mating efforts helped raise the number of these tortoises from just fifteen to two thousand. One hundred years old, Diego keeps going.

The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be "Did we overlook something?" And the second should be "Did our test fit the species?

Gould was clearly the expert taxonomist, but it was Darwin who proposed the radical notion: Was it possible for a species of birds to split into two (or more) species if the birds were isolated on separate islands? This notion eventually became the basis for what may be considered the most significant scientific revolution of our time, the theory of evolution.

This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species.

The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, "the others.

Nos hemos convertido en un caso de manual: la única especie animal, junto con la rata topo, que extermina a sus propios individuos.

Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting.

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

As a species, we have become a population of refugees, longing for homes we remember only faintly, as we remember dreams.

Evolution doesn't 'try' to do anything," M-Bot said. "But like it or not, you are the pinnacle of its work. All evolutionary pressures throughout all the ages among your species have resulted in you." "Bet it feels embarrassed," I said

Evolution doesn't 'try' to do anything," M-Bot said. "But like it or not, you are the pinnacle of its work. All evolutionary pressures throughout all the ages among your species have resulted in you.

Neuroscience has discovered that a key part of the brain that processes emotion is the "mammalian brain" or limbic system that we share with other mammals, though not with reptiles and lower life-forms. The warm, emotional bond between a dog and its owner, for example, transcends species. In contrast, any bond between a snake and its owner will be strictly one-way.

we're a social species. That's why connection matters. It's why shame is so painful and debilitating. It's why we're wired for belonging.

human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.